MICHEL KILE: GENDER AND HURRICANES ???
EXERPT
What is it about climate change that brings out the nuts and fruitcake theories? Now we learn that bestowing feminine names, or merely feminine-sounding ones, on hurricanes makes them so much more deadly
“Another storm in the gender tea-cup is also wreaking havoc. It began in mid-2014, when this paper – “Female Hurricanes Are Deadlier Than Male Hurricanes” – appeared here in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Sharon Shavitt, Walter H. Stellner Professor of Marketing at the University of Illinois, and her three co-authors, claim that an ‘unexplored social factor’ – namely ‘gender-based expectations’ – has a measurable ‘influence on the human toll of hurricanes that are assigned gendered names’.
“Feminine-named hurricanes (vs. masculine-named hurricanes) cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness. Using names such as Eloise or Charlie for referencing hurricanes….taps into well-developed and widely held gender stereotypes, with potentially deadly consequences.
“This finding indicates an unfortunate and unintended consequence of the gendered naming of hurricanes, with important implications for policymakers, media practitioners, and the general public concerning hurricane communication and preparedness.”
Analysing US hurricane death-rate data and the results of ‘laboratory experiments’ with University of Illinois students, they concluded that hurricane names constellated ‘gender-based expectations about severity’ and reduced ‘respondent preparedness to take protective action’.
Threatened populations apparently did not take female-named hurricanes seriously during the past six decades. They did not take the precautions they would have done with a male-named storm. Survival-decisions were influenced less by government and Weather Channel warnings and more by (i) whether the approaching storm-system was called Amazon or Alf, Hillary or Hank, Julia or John, Germaine or Guy, et cetera; and by (ii) a name’s degree of femininity, as determined by the authors.
The paper went viral. Gender scholars love it, as do folk who see not only ‘climate change’ but sexism everywhere.
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