Gender Bias in Hurricane Names - A Solution?
Hurricanes with female names are more deadly, at least in the good old US of A. Hurricanes in any year are given alternating male and female names, from a list that is predefined each year. A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Jung et al, 2014) shows that for land-falling tropical storms in the USA, those with female names are more “deadly” – causing more deaths than storms with male names. This bias was confirmed in laboratory experiments where students ranked hurricanes with masculine names such as Carlos as more deadly than those with female names such as Deborah. There is a nice summary of this paper on the Smithsonian website. The authors propose that people are less likely to evacuate or take other mitigative action if the hurricane name is female (less scary).
So if the current alternating female/male naming system is giving a false sense of security, what alternatives are there?
One possibility is to pick historic first names whose deadliness corresponds to the predicted intensity of a tropical storm. An example, linked to by the Saffir-Simpson scale for hurrican intensity used in the USA, is shown below. If you can't figure out who the characters are, scroll to the end of the blog.
|
Intensity of Tropical Cyclone |
Wind speeds |
Possible (First) Names |
|
Category Five Hurricane |
≥70 m/s, ≥137 knots |
Widespread death and damage: |
|
Category Four Hurricane |
58–70 m/s, 113–136 knots 130–156 mph, 209–251 km/h |
Some death and damage: |
|
Category Three Hurricane |
50–58 m/s, 96–112 knots |
Widespread damage: |
|
Category Two Hurricane |
43–49 m/s, 83–95 knots |
Respect, but mostly harmless: |
|
Category One Hurricane |
33–42 m/s, 64–82 knots |
Harmless: |
|
Tropical Storm |
18–32 m/s, 35–63 knots |
Ignore: |
|
Tropical depression |
<17 m/s, <34 knots |
|
There are of course a few problems with this sort of ranking. Perhaps the primary one is first-name ambiguity; some of these names are clearly “deadly” – such as Adolf and Genghis. But others are more open to individual interpretation – Josef could be Josef Conrad or Josef Stalin; William could be The Conqueror or the Duke of Cambridge; Joan could be Joan of Arc or Joan Baez, or your Aunty Joan. We’d need to use first and last names to remove this ambiguity. Also, some people might view Dubya as a force for good, and not take mitigative action…although maybe the impact of that particular naming bias would have a positive relative effect in the USA. Looking at the list again, it is interesting that the majority of “deathly” names are male, providing further evidence for the reasons behind gender bias in hurricane impacts in the current naming system.
So probably my proposed new naming scheme won’t solve the naming bias. It is certainly less boring than the current one. Maybe we can use fictional characters: Sauron; Darth Vader; Voldemort for the deathly storms and names like Bilbo; Leia; Dobby for the lower category systems.
| Category Five | Category Four | Category Three | Category Two | Category One |
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Comments and suggestions for a better system, or names for each category welcome…
The Cast
Adolf Hitler; Genghis Kahn; Pol Pot; Josef Stalin; Napoleon Bonerparte; George W (Dubya) Bush; Saddam Hussein
Robert Mugabre; Augustine Pinochet; PW Botha; Hendrik Verwoerd
Maggie Thatcher; Joan of Arc; Jacob Zuma; Tony Blair
Angela Merkel; Barack Obama; Nelson Mandela; Desmond Tutu; Alec Furguson; Julius Malema
Arsene Wenger; Kate Middleton; William Windsor; Mamphela Ramphele; Ban Ki-moon; Jaques Kallis
Kim Kardashian; One Direction; Justin Bieber
Sauron; Darth Vader; Syndrome; Princess Leia; Dobby the House-elf