Female Named Hurricanes Kill More than Male Named Hurricanes

I heard this story yesterday morning on WNYC morning edition and thought it was perfect for a lesson on causation versus correlation. Essentially the data shows a strong correlation between fatalities and the gender of a hurricane name. Essentially they found that female named hurricanes are much more deadly then male named hurricanes. We can present this to our students with the obvious question, "does that mean that the names are causing higher fatalities?" The goal is to get students to recognize how absurd it would be if we thought this was causal. That would mean that we could simply make a hurricane safer (or more deadly) by changing its name. So this gives students a clear distinction between correlated and causal.

So what is happening? What is a possible cause? If you review the story, articles and data below, you can see that people respond differently to a storm based on its name. It is this response that seems to be causing the difference in results. If we are more afraid of a female named storm, we might take more precautions, etc.

This still leads to more questions and class discussion, why do we respond differently? Why do we give names to storms at all?

Here is the radio story:
http://www.npr.org/2014/06/03/318414845/research-americans-less-fearful-of-storms-with-female-names

You can also find this story on their site:
http://www.wnyc.org/story/research-americans-less-fearful-of-storms-with-female-names/

http://www.wnyc.org/story/study-americans-less-fearful-of-storms-named-after-women/


Article on WNYC: http://www.wnyc.org/story/do-female-named-hurricanes-need-to-lean-in/

Article on the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/06/02/female-named-hurricanes-kill-more-than-male-because-people-dont-respect-them-study-finds/

Original Study:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/29/1402786111.abstract

Download Data from Original Study:
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/05/30/1402786111.DCSupplemental

You can also find the data key here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5FTxsu-S1CoQ1ZSM2VSR3Yxc3c/edit?usp=sharing

And the original data here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5FTxsu-S1CoQVJIVzl4SV9yb0k/edit?usp=sharing