The female of the species: a rant.

Kiju Jung is the lead-author of a study which tells us that hurricanes given female names cause more fatalities than those given male names.

The basic idea is that because women aren't conceived as being as strong and intense as men, hurricanes with female names don't seem as scary and so people don't run away and hide as fast. Or, indeed, at all.

The study involved ranking the storm names from very feminine to very masculine (which is odd in itself, because I'd have said that generally names are one or the other).


"People imagining a 'female' hurricane were not as willing to seek shelter," said co-author Sharon Shavit. "The stereotypes that underlie these judgments are subtle and not necessarily hostile toward women - they may involve viewing women as warmer and less aggressive than men."

I'd like to draw attention to two points, here. First, the use of the word imagining. This word is necessarily present because the results of the study were partly based on a questionnaire, not on actual hurricane data.

Second, it's worth looking at the authors of the study. The lead author Kiju Jung is a doctoral student, and his co-authors Madhu Viswanathan and Sharon Shavitt are both professors from the University of Illinois (there's another author, Joseph Hilbe, of Arizona Sate University, but I don't know anything about him).

And are these people meteorologists? Statisticians?

Nope. 

They are specialists in...

...marketing.

From this evidence, they are rather good at it, too.

Word To Use Today: hurricane. This word comes from Spanish, from the Taino word hura, which means wind.