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November 14, 2014
Q. What does the University of California, Berkeley, “Wellness Letter” mean when it cautions, “Stay well! Better respect a ‘hericane' as much as a ‘himicane'?” Don't let such stormy, if nominal, sexism blow you away.
A. According to the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” people tend to perceive female-named storms as less of a threat and thus become more susceptible to their deadly consequences, the newsletter reports. When researchers looked at 92 strong hurricanes that hit the U.S. between 1950-2012, they found that those with more feminine names were deadlier, and further calculated that “changing the more masculine name of a severe hurricane to a more feminine one could almost triple the death toll” — ”a hazardous form of implicit sexism.”
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