Including unknowns
Including unknown cases, deaths by gender is shown in Figure 37. Males are the most frequent lightning victims, but the unknown category is larger than the female group. Figure 37 is shown for deaths because the percentage of cases with no gender reported was much less for deaths than injuries. By region, when unknown cases are included, more than half of all deaths and injuries involved one or more males, except for injuries in the west coast, Midwest, and northeast. Another 5 to 18% involved one or more females. The largest number of unknown cases was 46.1% in the northeast for injuries (Table 32).

Figure 37: Gender of US lightning deaths from 1959 to 1994 including unknown cases.

Without unknowns
For the US without the unknown cases, Figure 38 shows that males are the most frequent lightning fatalities (84.1%). By region (Table 33), the male component ranged from 76.1 to 93.6% for deaths and injuries. The female range was 6.4 to 23.9% in the regions.

In summary, males are killed 4.6 times as often as females, and are 5.3 times as likely as females to be injured. There are twice as many injuries as deaths without a gender specified in the Storm Data digital dataset.

Males also comprised between 79 and 89% of the victims in the US (Duclos and Sanderson, 1990), Florida (Duclos et al., 1990; Holle et al., 1992; Paxton and Morales, 1997), and North Carolina (Langley et al., 1991). Similar ratios were found in Singapore (Pakiam et al., 1981), and England and Wales (Elsom, 1993).

Many of the same studies showed that males in their twenties are the most frequent victims of lightning. The digital record in Storm Data does not include the victim's age but its verbal narrative usually does. For this reason, an age analysis of the entire Storm Data record was not made for the present report.

Figure 38: Gender of US lightning deaths from 1959 to 1994 without unknown cases.