Since 1851, the U.S. has been hit by about 980 hurricanes — some taking on male names, and some taking on female names; however, according to recently published research from the University, hurricanes with more feminine names may be more deadly than those with masculine-sounding names.

The lead author, graduate student Kiju Jung, and his coauthors suggest that this may be the case because Americans don’t take feminine-sounding hurricanes as seriously as masculine ones.

“There appears to be some implicit gendered expectation based on the name of a hurricane — certain qualities associated with women to hurricanes with more feminine names … such as being warm and so on,” said co-author Madhu Viswanathan, Business professor. “Similarly, qualities like aggression and strength may be associated with hurricanes with more masculine names.”

The study looked at every hurricane that’s made landfall from 1950 to 2012, excluding hurricanes Katrina and Audrey because they were deadlier than the average storm.

“Names are assigned arbitrarily, based on a predetermined list of alternating male and female names,” Jung said in a press release, referring to a hurricane naming list that’s been in place since 1978. “If people in the path of a severe storm are judging the risk based on the storm’s name, then this is potentially very dangerous.”

According to one of the models the team cites, changing the name of a hurricane, say Charley, to Eloise could nearly triple its death toll.

In addition to the archival component of the study, researchers presented participants in experiments with the scenario of an approaching hurricane and asked them to rate the hurricanes, given either male or female names, on a number of dimensions — like intensity and riskiness.

“What we found is that people rated female named hurricanes as being less intense and less risky when compared to male named hurricanes,” Viswanathan said. “People also expressed lesser intention to evacuate, even in the face of an evacuation order.”

The whole reason for assigning names to hurricanes was partly to enhance recall, but in the study, the researchers say this has unintended consequences.

“The findings suggest that natural disasters, when given gendered names, can elicit gender-congruent expectancies that (de)motivate preparedness,” they wrote.

As climate change progresses, hazardous weather will become more severe and dangerous, and in light of this, Viswanathan said this is an important area in need of more research.

“We’re not making specific policy recommendations based on one study, such decisions are best addressed by policy experts. There are complex considerations here and each possible solution may have some downside. But we think this issue should be looked into,” he said. “Most importantly, people need to consciously consider relevant information about a hurricane and remember that the assigned male or female name means nothing.”

University atmospheric sciences Professor Eric Snodgrass, read the article when it came out last week. He said it was an interesting and important read for people in his field, calling the research part of “a great movement to improve public perception” of severe weather.

“It’s unfortunate that too many people aren’t really reading the article and just reading the headline, thinking it’s a bunch of garbage … that it’s just a silly data bias,” he said. “With full read of the article, you can see that’s not the case. They did a lot to understand human perception of this.”

“One of the big pushes we’ve had … is to try to make public information about severe weather, especially hurricanes and thunderstoms, much more vivid than in the past, so that when people hear things, they can understand the immediacy and understand the severity so they can take proper action,” he said. “When we hear a study like this, one of the things we think about is, ‘Gosh, here’s an area where we’ve kind of let things down,’ … we need to do something about it because we want the responses to be immediate.”

Austin can be reached at [email protected] or @austinkeating3.