Don't these people seem to be, ah,
reaching just a tad?
[H]istorically, hurricanes with female names have, on average, killed more people than those with male ones. . . . As they write, “changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley to Eloise could nearly triple its death toll”.
Why?
The names certainly don’t reflect a storm’s severity, and they alternate genders from one to the next.
Jung team thinks that the effect he found is due to unfortunate stereotypes that link men with strength and aggression, and women with warmth and passivity. Thanks to these biases, people might take greater precautions to protect themselves from Hurricane Victor, while reacting more apathetically to Hurricane Victoria.
Camille, Rita, and Katrina beg to differ. I think the question is "what category and how fast is it moving, and bow badly did the weather dudes screw up the last one?" Those seem to have more bearing on the stay/go decision than do the masculinity of the story's name.
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1
Hurricanes are merely an expression of Gaia's wrath against our evil carbon-burning ways, so OF COURSE the female hurricanes are stronger! Nature is a mother, after all.
ReplyDeleteAny other explanation is sheer paternalistic misogyny.
Well, what I kept telling my wife when we were stationed at Tyndall on the Florida panhandle was that what I refused to evacuate in the face of was hurricanes, not himmicanes....
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
I didn't read the article because I figured somebody was having a little joke with statistics.
ReplyDeleteOh, would that it were true.
ReplyDeleteYou know what might be more interesting to study? Since hurricane names alternate between male and female, is it possible the actual causation here isn't the psychological, but meteorological? Is it possible there's a pattern to the strength of developing hurricanes that a strong hurricane is preceded by a weak one? I don't have the data, but it may be worth looking into.
ReplyDeleteIs it possible there's a pattern to the strength of developing hurricanes that a strong hurricane is preceded by a weak one?
ReplyDeleteNo, if there were such a ratcheting effect, we'd expect to see a general increase from the weak in the strength of the hurricanes across the season, or a general decrease from the strong. We don't generally see that.
Because Koch.
Eric Hines
It occurs to me that this thesis, if true, should mean that the regions of the US subject to hurricanes should show markedly less sexism than other areas. This is because of the principle of 'survival of the fittest' -- those who tend to survive will be those who evacuate without applying an inappropriate sexist filter to the names of the storms. Thus, there should be a natural competitive advantage to non-sexism in those areas.
ReplyDeleteSo we can test the hypothesis!
The grant money for this proposed investigation is low-hanging fruit.
ReplyDelete