Gender and Evacuation: A Closer Look at Why Women are More Likely to Evacuate for Hurricanes

Studies of hurricane evacuation have often noted that women are more likely than men to evacuate, yet few examined those differences and tried to explain them. This paper undertakes a series of bivariate and multivariate analyses to examine the relationship between evacuation and gendered variations in socioeconomic status, care-giving roles in the household, evacuation incentives, exposure to risks, and perception of risk. A series of hypotheses is developed and tested in order to help explain why women are more likely than men to evacuate. The data used come from a cross-sectional survey of 1,050 coastal North Carolina households affected by Hurricane Bonnie, which made landfall near Wilmington, NC, on August 25, 1998. Results from a series of bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses indicate that women are more likely to evacuate than men because of socially constructed gender differences in care-giving roles, access to evacuation incentives, exposure to risk, and perceived risk. We find, in part, that women are most likely to evacuate because, compared to men, they live at greater exposure to risk and have a heightened perception of risk. Yet, those men who are at greater risk and do perceive heightened risk are more likely to evacuate than women with comparable risk exposure and perception. Future studies of disaster response should distinguish clearly between the intention to evacuate and the capacity to do so.