The Sexist History of Weather: Why Hurricanes Were Named Only for Women

As Hurricane Ida rips its way through the country’s Southeast — on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, no less — newscasters across America are referring to the storm as a “she.” Not odd, considering the name. But behind that single pronoun is a fascinatingly sexist history.

For some reason, Atlantic hurricanes were named after women for a quarter of the 20^th century, starting in 1953. (Before that, human names weren’t usually involved.) Archival press clips show that men believed “people would not take storms seriously if names did not evoke images of female fury,” The Washington Post reported.

Weathermen were said to have chosen the names of their (ex-) wives or girlfriends to conjure that kind of rage, at least in their own heads.

When the identification system was officially introduced, only two names on the approved list were actually “picked with real people in mind,” said Ivan Ray Tannehill, the then-U.S. Weather Bureau chief. One was “Orpha,” after a woman in one of the bureau’s offices, and the other was “Wallis,” for Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, who scandalized the world by divorcing twice and then marrying King Edward VIII — who then abdicated the throne for her. A book called Tempest, by Liz Skilton, documents this admission and chronicles the sexist history of the scheme.

Historically, the names chosen “have been fraught with racism and sexism, personal preferences and vendettas,” according to Atlas Obscura. “It took a long time to reach a unified system, and bring democracy and regional representation into account.”

As the 1970s rolled around, feminists were getting tired of the negative characterization of women that pervaded every facet of society, even in something as seemingly innocuous as the names of hurricanes. An activist named Roxcy Bolton, who suggested that the storms be renamed “himicanes,” told the media at the time that women “deeply resent being arbitrarily associated with disaster.”

But as women like Bolton began to lobby for change, men ground in their heels.

“Weather Men Insist Storms Are Feminine,” blared a New York Times headline in 1972. Because men often considered women unpredictable, vengeful, or generally stormy, the men at the U.S. Weather Bureau were myopic in their decision to continue using only feminine names. (Aka, they were entirely predictable.)

As late as 1977, the Houston Post ran an editorial that seriously asserted that calling hurricanes by the names of men would not be as effective as the existing evocation of shrews: “It’s doubtful that a National Hurricane Center bulletin that Tropical Storm Al had formed in the Gulf or Hurricane Jake was threatening the Texas Coast would make us run for cover quite as fast.”

In actuality, the boys in charge were disastrously incorrect in their assumptions.

A 2014 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that “feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes” — but not because the lady storms are or were harsher. The researchers' lab experiments showed that the higher fatality rate “is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action.”

The authors, who looked at six decades of data, wrote: “This pattern may emerge because individuals systematically underestimate their vulnerability to hurricanes with more feminine names, avoiding or delaying protective measures.”

So, if we equate womanhood with hurricanes, they're vengeful and furious, yet … innocuous and weak. If anything ever so neatly encapsulated the way women have been treated for centuries, it’s this odd, tiny corner of weather history. Men have long categorized women as one extreme or the other — we’ve long been denied our complexity.

But these days, wrathful hurricanes like Ike, Andrew, and Mitch, we see you. We know what you did. And, oh, hey, Tropical Storm Julian, sorry to hear that you are, right this very minute, fizzling out slowly over the Atlantic.

Looks like when it comes down to it, using two distinct genders to describe literal maelstroms is far from helpful, and doing so simply perpetuates stereotypes that no longer make sense.