Female Hurricanes More Deadly Than Male?

There's a new study out that makes the rather strange claim that hurricanes with women's names are inherently more dangerous than ones named after men. This is of course utterly ridiculous, but facts are facts, ma'am. The prestigious National Academy of Sciences has put out a study stating this is true because people don’t take them as seriously. They analysed hurricane data all the way back to 1950, when all hurricanes had female names (they only started getting male names on alternate years in 1979). 

This probably also matters because hurricanes, on average, have been getting less deadly over time. “It could be that more people die in female-named hurricanes, simply because more people died in hurricanes on average before they started getting male names,” says Jeff Lazo, a social scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Hurricane Sandy pretty much messed everything up. If you ignore Sandy, then male-named hurricanes have caused more deaths than female ones. Harold Brooks of NOAA has performed a similar analysis on this data (removing Sandy) with similar results. The authors conclude: "Although our findings do not definitively establish the processes involved, the phenomenon we identified could be viewed as a hazardous form of implicit sexism. Other investigators, however, question that conclusion, which they say is based on too little data to give a complete picture.

To complicate matters even further, here's just one more thought. According to Wikipedia, the name, "Sandy" is a unisex name (not male or female); the male version can be a diminutive of "Alexander," "Alasdair," "Sandipan", "Sanford," or "Santiago," while the female version is a diminutive for "Sandra" or less commonly "Alexandra" and "Cassandra". So it's probably a wash.