A sexist skirt for that pretty casual look

Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate have been retired. They are the names of four of last season's hurricanes that have caused enough damage to be stricken off as names for storms in the near future.

Every six years, the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization (WMO) uses a set list of names for storms that hit the Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific area, and then rotates to another list and works through it for another six years.

The exception is if a hurricane is particularly deadly or costly. Then its name is substituted. So Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate - which caused hundreds of deaths and more than US$250 billion in damages - have been replaced by Harold, Idalia, Margot, and Nigel, the WMO said this month.

But here's a little trivia. Between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, the names of hurricanes were all female. The first record of a hurricane with a male name was likely in 1975, when Australia decided to call the first cyclone of the season, Alan. The United States followed in 1979 with its first "male" hurricane - Bob.

In the US, the winds of change blew in around the 1960s and the early 1970s, when feminist groups grew tired of the sexist connotations behind such devastating storms. The maritime trade often refers to seas and ocean as women, and in the 1950s, meteorologists began labelling hurricanes as women by extension.

Of course, the gender reference was then stretched further: storms became "temperamental" and "flirty".

Among those who fought against the use of female-only hurricanes was Roxcy Bolton, a feminist lobbying for equal constitutional rights for women in the US. In her words, she deeply resented that women were being "arbitrarily associated with disaster", reported a New York Times obituary for Ms Bolton, who died last year.

The archives are not completely clear on how the feminists won this tempest. What was clear was the scepticism they had to cut through.

In 1977, the Houston Post questioned if a man's name would signal the same sense of imminent danger without what it called "the feminine mystique". It added: "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."

This male indignation persisted nearly a decade later. An editorial from The Washington Post in 1986 said this "non-sexist nomenclature has a funny ring to it" and added: "Somehow many of the male names don't convey either the romance or the urgency that circumstances might warrant."

Reading that today is not unlike watching re-runs of old US sitcoms. The sexism can be stark and the jokes less funny. It would be distasteful today to tie romance to destruction wrought by natural disasters.

Today, the battle of names plays out in the labelling of robots and digital personal assistants. It's hard to ignore that Siri, Alexa, and several chatbots are deemed female. (The first chatbot was named Eliza, after the protagonist in the play, Pygmalion.) The world's first robot citizen is Sophia.

Female robots tend to fit a subservient role, and there's at least one study showing that a female voice is associated with assistive roles for being more soothing, and less forceful.

Fictional female robots in sci-fi films such as Her, Blade Runner, and Ex-Machina convey "feminine mystique". Their male counterparts such as T-1000 and HAL 9000 from Terminator 2 and 2001: A Space Odyssey respectively, were far from passive characters, by contrast.

To be sure, a survey has suggested that it is the tenor, rather than the gender, that matters more for voice assistance. But a CNN report also pointed to an episode of hysteria in the late 1990s, when German men refused to be directed by a female-voiced navigation system that had been built into BMW cars. The cars were recalled.

Then there's the creep factor. Siri gets propositions of the "what are you wearing" genre. In 2016, a private investor and designer also spent more than US$50,000 to build a robot in the uncanny likeness of actress Scarlet Johansson, leading some to question if this ushers in a next phase of objectifying women - literally.

And consider also, the etymology of the word "robot". It comes from the Old Church Slavonic word "rabota", meaning servitude or forced labour.

Is this a storm in a teacup? The way to start a case for diversity is to ask why a certain pigeonholing has to be the case. A powerful dominant class - be it along the lines of gender, sex, race or age - can make a reductive assumption for a less-dominant class that is convenient, and the preconception becomes status quo. So labels from the femme fatale to the Stepford Wives are but lazy tropes.

Ms Bolton went on to start the first rape treatment centre in the US. She also lobbied for National Airlines to grant maternity leave to pregnant flight attendants instead of firing them, and got Miami department stores to remove men-only dining sections in their restaurants. She and her peers dared to ask why, and today, women can wield some bargaining power because the women before them paved a wider path to freedom.

Still, even at the time of Ms Bolton's passing, it can't be said that women are held equal. Six words into her obituary, you would know that tacit sexism is alive. Hurricane Roxcy was no doubt celebrated for the legacy she built, but pity the casual characterisation. In 2017, she died "tempestuous".