The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.

flowingdata.com

189 pointswell_i_never148 comments

First, this is a great and original (AFAIK) post. Kudos to the author!

Second, I actually find the most interesting fact to be completely unmentioned by the author: that in the first chart (greatest absolute changes), of the 30 biggest swaps, only two were female->male, while the other 28 (over 90%!) were male->female.

It's a remarkable fact -- makes me think of how it's historically been much more acceptable for women to adopt men's styles of clothing, but much less accepted for men to adopt's women's styles of clothing. And with names being equally "fashionable", this fits the same trend.

This also explains what I'd observed but never articulated about late 19th- and early 20th-century fiction: how come so many men have what are to me "women's names"?

Utterly fascinating.

I think it was the original Freakonomics book where I first saw this but it’s a known effect. Name switching is indeed almost purely a one way street

> It's a remarkable fact -- makes me think of how it's historically been much more acceptable for women to adopt men's styles of clothing, but much less accepted for men to adopt's women's styles of clothing.

This is still the case today. I feel like the two are entirely unrelated, actually. If anything, we’ve seen the opposite phenomenon happen in every market. Buffalo Wild Wings commercials that cater to masculinity, Dr Pepper marketing towards men who typically don’t drink diet soda, hair salons that play sports, scents that smell like trees, etc.

How interesting because from my perspective (a woman) I feel like I'm seeing significantly fewer products that are marketed to/cater to traditional notions of femininity and instead there seems to be a trend towards inclusivity.

Tom Ford, Bvlgari, Calvin Klein, and Chanel all have uni-sex fragrances now. Chanel's is called "Boy" and CK's is very inclusively named "all". And there's a _huge_ trend in high-end cosmetics that makeup has no gender. CoverGirl even has a "CoverBoy" spokesmodel now.

And of course, any company that dares to "pink it and shrink it" will feel the wrath of Ellen and r/pointlesslygendered.

The feminist movement managed to make femininity almost a swear word. Fascinating and very sad. As a male, I was always turned off by unisex products. I wonder how much profit these big companies make with this new marketing strategy. Is it really profitable, or are they just changing their products to avoid public shitstorms, hoping that the shitstorm avoided would have been even worse?

Your musings here are legitimate, so long as you recognize your feelings as a single datapoint and don't mistake them for a general trend, or extrapolate them to the wider population.

As a counterpoint, I don't know of any friends or close acquaintances who would consider feminism or femininity a dirty word. To me, it's a fairly straightforward proposition:

Q: Are you pro- women having equal rights to men w.r.t. social structures, family responsibilities, economic opportunities, etc.?

A: Yes?

Q: And are you willing to take a second look at your social and professional conduct to make sure it doesn't put your female peers in difficult, awkward or uncomfortable positions?

A: Sure, why wouldn't I.

Hooray! you might be a feminist, it's not that hard.

Also, personally don't see what's wrong with unisex products, and I think it may be possible companies might possibly occasionally find the odd not-shitty cause they can back because their employees collectively believe in the positive message and that also aligns well with their goals, and not solely because of a small group of cynical PR managers running focus groups.

That's a naive look at feminism. Unfortunately nowadays many other ideologies jump on the feminism bandwagon. It's rare to see someone who is feminist without being also anti-law enforcement, anti-white men, anti-capitalist.

The post to which you replied seems to address your concerns:

“Your musings here are legitimate, so long as you recognize your feelings as a single datapoint and don't mistake them for a general trend, or extrapolate them to the wider population.”

For your first claim, I wish people would stop talking about feminism in this way precisely because it is such a generally accepted stance. The better question is in what ways does one believe men and women aren't structurally equal?

I think you've kind of proved your opponents' points here: support for equal rights and dignity for women is something supported by feminism's opponents as much as it is by feminists, so it's a poor differentiator between the two.

I think I can do better. I'm pretty sure non-feminists would disagree with both of the following. How many feminists would disagree with either?

Q: Do you believe that The Patriarchy controls society and oppresses us?

Q: Do you believe that unequal rights under the law (e.g. Affirmitive Action) are necessary to correct the injustices you perceive in society?

(1) is the question that I would expect most clearly correlates with being a feminist (by self-identification); from an information-theoretical point of view, this would be what defines feminism.

(2) is the counter to your argument directly: women have at least equal rights to men in most developed nations; feminists blame differences in outcomes that remain on The Patriarchy, whereas opponents of feminism typically explain them by actual differences between men and women, dispositionally and otherwise (For example the "gender wage gap": https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf). Actual feminists typically argue against equal rights for women (for example demanding governmental pressure to change hiring ratios: https://nwlc.org/resources/affirmative-action-and-what-it-me...).

=---=

TBH I don't really care about unisex/gendered products. I'm not going to waste my money on Gilette's patronising garbage (I mean Stealth? Mach 3? And oh my word the prices. It's a razor for Christ's sake). Nonetheless, if people want to pay more for a product to have it branded for their gender, that's their business and none of mine or anyone else's.

> The feminist movement managed to make femininity almost a swear word. Fascinating and very sad.

I'm not sure I follow. Care to explain?

> As a male, I was always turned off by unisex products. I wonder how much profit these big companies make with this new marketing strategy. Is it really profitable, or are they just changing their products to avoid public shitstorms, hoping that the shitstorm avoided would have been even worse?

Wouldn't unisex products be more economical since one product now has twice the demographic?

I would not buy unisex fragrance for example, or deodorant. So yeah, twice the market and zero selling power.

> The feminist movement managed to make femininity almost a swear word.

Being "like a girl" being insult is not something that started with feminism.

When have been women insulted for “being like a girl”? “Tomboy” could be insulting, though.

The “like a girl” ad campaign by Always was one of the first feminist campaigns (that I remember at least) to go viral: https://youtu.be/XjJQBjWYDTs

For a man to throw "like a girl" is generally seen as an insult.

Yes, but being feminine seen as something “bad” for women (which I thing was mlang23’s point) is much, much more recent. (I understand that women were seen as “inferior” due to some of those “feminine” traits. But I think they were insulted if they were not feminine enough, more than for being too feminine.)

Even products for menstruation are unisex now!

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/pg-nixes-venus-symbol-fro...

Ironically, pink used to be the boys' color back a couple hundred years, because royal red = king, pink = prince, blue = princess.

The pink = girl color switched only in more recent times. It's very stupid.

Those colour preferences might be innate though https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12512-women-may-be-ha...

I don't think it proves all that much, especially considering that the study does not even mention much higher color blindness levels among males. In the most common version of color blindness, pink tend to looks like yellow piss.

Funny:

> As expected from previous work, both sexes rated blues as best. But analysis of all the colour comparisons revealed that the women had a significantly higher preference for blues with “pinkish” undertones such as lilac

But actual color split is between woman getting pinkish pink and boys getting bluish blue. It is not "women get slightly more violet shade of blue like lilac". It is "boys are blue and girls are pink" - pink being completely different color then is supposed to be female preference according to the study.

> Hurlbert speculates there may also be evolutionary arguments for both sexes’ preference for blue. “Going back to our ‘savannah’ days, we would have a natural preference for a clear blue sky, because it signalled good weather.

Lets not pretend this is science.

How do you even design a study that removes "culturally adapted color preference" from the equation? I call BS.

I hope that the trend is indeed heading in that direction but it does take years for high fashion to permeate through society.

> We’ve seen the opposite phenomenon happen in every market.

Not really? If buffalo wings are like a man's name, or men's pants, the same trend would be for women to adopt those things (which we do). Similarly, if you market only towards women, it is seen as somewhat shameful for a man (and sometimes, even for a woman) to purchase that good.

Is that not the exact phenomenon I'm talking about though? The markets exist because masculinity says it's otherwise embarrassing.

The same thing doesn't always exist in reverse. It's not embarrassing for women to drink black coffee or a beer, but it defies social masculinity for a man to drink sugary coffee or a mixed drink. It's fine for women to wear jeans, flannel, basically all mens clothes but it's taboo for men to wear any feminine piece of clothing.

You can probably come up with examples that betray this as a rule, which is why I'm not claiming it is one. It's a social influence that's pervasive to the degree that masculinity kills men who don't see a doctor or men that have their masculinity questioned and they retaliate with murder.

You hardly see women committing crimes because they were perceived as masculine.

> Dr Pepper marketing towards men who typically don’t drink diet soda

Don't forget Coke Zero, AKA "Diet Coke for men".

Many of those have the same root cause: Men are not supposed to be weak, and feminine is seen as weak. To encourage men to buy something, marketing teams are trying to manly it up. If you have a product men are sheepish about, declare loudly that "It's for men!". Or in Dr Pepper's case, "It's not for women"(tm).

> Dr Pepper marketing towards men who typically don’t drink diet soda

I'm not sure that is how I would characterize the Dr. Pepper Lil' Sweet commercials, which appear to feature an extra campy mashup of Prince and peak glam-hair metal Axl Rose.

They probably don't mention it because they aren't measuring that statistic. If you want to see how likely it is that people will name their male babies "female" names you could probably do that, but you couldn't do that by looking at the "most switched" names from a popularity standpoint.

In particular, naming your male a "female" name (or vice versa) that has not switched would really do a better job at showing what society thinks of this. Especially because a singular event in pop culture can switch the public perception of the gender-ness of a name: e.g. the election of John F Kennedy turning "Jackie" into a "female" name practically overnight.

I don't have a specific source but I believe that masculine names shifting to become feminine, but not the reverse, is a common thing going back at least a few centuries.

E.g. Leslie, Allison, Meredith, Lauren, Stacey were all predominantly male names until the 19th or 20th century. Often the shift seems to be due to a celebrity - the change in "Lauren" being generally attributed to Lauren Bacall, etc.

Lots of them have pretty likely explanations.

For instance, Angel got quite a lot more popular when Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a character of that name.

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_(name)

I don't think Angel has anything to do with Buffy. Angel is a traditional Hispanic male name. It's become more poopular because there's a lot more Hispanics in the US now, and they have a lot of kids. Other Hispanic names have also been rising in the name-popularity lists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_(given_name)

Now if you want to see some interesting effects in name popularity due to popular culture, look at the quick demise of "Jude" after The Beatles' song, and the quick demise of "Jeremy" after Pearl Jam's song.

If you look at the graph, there is a notable change in the growth slope a couple years before 2000, which coincides with the introduction of the character.

There's also a decline a few years later.

I always find amusing that in many countries Andrea (which literally means "male") is a girl's name. Is there an equivalent for boys?

Does it? Any links? Perhaps from the greek Andros? I'm curious.

Yes, it comes from "aner" in Greek: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea

I do not think that is surprising, considering -a is feminine suffix in many languages, and there there is masculine version Andreas (with -as masculine suffix). And i understand literal meaning of Andrea / Andreas / Andrew more like 'manly' than 'male'.

yes there is definitely a double standard between a) masculinity in women and b) femininity in men

"My name is Sue! How do you do? Now you're gonna die!"

I wonder if there was any fluctuation in "Sue" after Johnny Cash's recording of Shel Silverstein "A Boy Named Sue" spent three weeks at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1969 (second only to the Stone's "Honky Tonk Woman"). He even performed it in the East Room of the White House by request of Richard Nixon on April 17, 1970!

Johnny Cash - A Boy Named Sue (from Man in Black: Live in Denmark):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ3tFPTUhAE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_Named_Sue

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/johnny-cash/a-boy-named-sue

>Bailey from Moses Lake, Wa: Did you guys know that this song has some historical significance. There was a court case in 1925 called the Scopes Monkey Trial (having to do with the teaching of evelution in public schools). The original prosecutors in the case were two brothers named Herbert E. Hicks and Sue K. Hicks. They were both friends of Scope. Anyway, Sue got his name because it was his mother's name and she died giving birth to him. The rumor has it that Johnny Cash or Shel Silverstein or whoever wrote the song thought that the fact that there was a boy named Sue was funny, and then wrote a song about it. So the boy that was named Sue actually had some significance. Yup and that's my bit to put in.

>-Thank you AP U.S. History!! Bailey Wa.

"The hero of Canton, the man they call Jayne!"

There's a german cover version: Ein Mädchen namens Gerd (A girl called Gerd).

in 1971 Little Murders (based on the 1966 play) was released (includes a great speech by Donald Southerland) in which the father is named Carol Newquist and constantly says it's a man's name.

Maybe also inspired by a real example?

Gerd is a women's name in Norway, and I would think in other Nordic countries, since it's after a giant-goddess with the same name (the wife of Frey). So there would have been a lot of girls named Gerd around at the time.

Of famous people, I can only remember the actor Dana Ashbrook, who played Bobby Briggs in Twin Peaks.

The fact that the name "Yuri" is on this list is interesting because "Yuri" is both a masculine Slavic name and a feminine Japanese name. The rapid switch could be due to the growth or decline of one of these names, where the two usages of Yuri are distinct (from different languages), as opposed to one name whose associated gender changed.

Similar for Angel, which probably includes Ángel. I would consider them the same name. Even with the shared meaning, the pronunciation is different enough.

I wonder if you could tease this out by looking at state-level data.

I find the Krishna name interesting. Krishna is a male Hindu deity. However, it seems a lot of people were naming their girls Krishna. Now, it is a boy's name again.

My speculation for the cause of this is that Hare Krishna became popular among certain US groups in the 1970's and a lot of them named their daughters Krishna. Then, in more recent times, there has been a lot more immigration from India into the US, and these families name their boys Krishna.

Perhaps in the 70s people also stuck to the general trend of female names ending with a vowel while make names typically ended with a consonant. Immigration from cultures such as India where this isn't the trend might indeed be responsible for it waning.

In latin countries male names end in o, and girls names end in a.

Not universally true. Consider a male name like Luca

Or Andrea.

Same as Lucas

Seems like a case of s-dropping from a transliteration of a Greek name, Lucas.

c.f. Andreas -> Andrea.

This has absolutely been the trend in India. Majority of male names from my generation and my parents' generation end in consonants, and ending with a vowel was indicative of a feminine name.

So I doubt Indian immigration at least impacted this trend in the direction suggested.

Though Krishnā is also a name, and the feminine version of Krishna (Krishnā is one of Draupadi's other names; where both Krishna and Draupadi are characters in the _Mahabharata_).

The point is, in India, Krishna is overwhelmingly a male name, with a few exceptions.

Final long a is a feminine noun in Sanskrit. Short a is usually a masculine in Sanskrit. There are some exceptions to this.

Krishna is a river in India. It's very common to name daughters after rivers in India. Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Kaveri are more common feminine river names than Krishna, though.

Jesus is a regionally popular name in states along the Mexican border including Arizona, Texas, California and New Mexico.

https://flowingdata.com/2013/11/18/regional-names/

I wonder why more people don't name their children God? Maybe because it becomes problematic during the teenaged years.

My mother's name is Krishna, born in the early 1940s in Jhang ("West Punjab" then immigrated eastwards with partition). Just a random data point for you.

Cross cultural names are a source of misunderstandings. Many male Russian names, like Nikita or Ilya, are interpreted as female in English-speaking countries because of the -a ending. Same with male Italian names like Andrea.

Kenyatta: Interesting name whose origin (by Wikipedia) is skewed. It mentions individuals born in 21st century and completely ignores the 1st person to literally hold that name: Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, born in early 1890's. It wasn't a traditional African name, but he bestowed it upon himself in his early 20's. Among the Maasai community, it referred to a traditional belt and Jomo, whilst living amongst the Maasai always had such a belt. The name fascinated him and he adopted it, altering the spelling to include 'Kenya' since he'd political ambitions

Somehow the results seem dissatisfying.

This really feels like it should be measuring the area under the curve, at the very least. Measuring "peak to peak" seems silly.

I like the graphic presentation but think it would have been better to just show the number of male and female usages of each name over time, so we'd have a double curve with two colors. Showing only the difference you can't see if a name got more or less popular for both genders equally.

As a Casey (last name), I've been intrigued by the transitions over time. It would be interesting to map this to major events.

For example, the #2 name "Jackie" switched from a heavily boys name to a heavily girls name about 1/3 of the way through the data set which would be around 1960. Also in 1960, JFK was elected and his wife was "Jackie" Kennedy. She became First Lady and a fashion icon immediately.

Hi (distant) cousin. My paternal Grandma's maiden name was Casey, she named her son Casey, and I have the middle name of Casey. In 3 generations it had a spot in all 3 names and both genders.

It predates the US, but the name switch that has astonished me the most is "Anne" which was unambiguously masculine and is now so unambiguously feminine that it looks strange to see it used for a male in a historical context.

it was optionally masculine for a brief period in a few countries

Different language families. It is/was feminine in the Latin world, and masculine, related to germanic Arne, in some pockets of Western Europe [Frisia, Scotland, France].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne

Interesting that the one Scottish and one English entry in that list were both named after Queen Anne. Was it generally acceptable to name boys after well-known women, or only after female royalty?

I was thinking the same thing wrt to Jean (french) vs English Jean. Or Ariel (Hebrew).

The male and female names have different origins, and Anne was never a masculine name in english so it’s not a transition.

I wonder if you ignored spelling what the results would be? ex: kodi, codi, cody, etc. all grouped together.

If you ignore spelling you also deal with heteronyms (same spelling, different pronunciation).

All the men I know named "Jan" pronounce it in the Germanic way (roughly Yahn), and the women I know pronounce it with a soft g.

Not sure how helpful that data would be, considering you'd get groupings like Aaron/Erin, which are very gender-aligned names.

I know more males called Erin than females. It's a common Irish first name that has nothing to do with the name Aaron, it literally means Ireland.

The article is about the United States.

> This [plot # 2] view wasn’t very useful

I disagree. It shows that far more gender-neutral or boy names become significantly more popular as girl names, compared to the other way around. That's pretty interesting.

This conforms to the idea that a boy with a girl's name (or other girlish attribute) is bad, whereas a girl with a boy's name (or other boyish attribute) is not as bad, or is even good.

This happens to many things. Once something becomes female dominated, men steer clear. Clothing and fashion is another example. Heck even some sports are like that!

Like programming in the 40s & 50s?

I don't know whether it's a problem with my browser or the website, but the font rendering is really bad for this site.

Ubuntu Linux, I see the same on Chrome and Firefox.

The heights are wonky. Specifically for d, r, and u, and w.

Seems to work fine on other platforms.

The site is using a webfont "protection" technique that was mentioned in a comment here a couple months ago, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20708371. It's a terrible idea.

Ah, this explains the other times I've seen this.

That "DRM" doesn't seem any more secure than ROT13... can we trace this terrible idea back to its source? I can't believe more than one person would come up with it by themselves.

Huh. I helped implement something similar on the site I work on, but for entirely user focused needs, without realising that it would be potentially problematic in certain renderers. Will have to check today, thanks for the heads up.

font-family:"Mercury SSm A", "Mercury SSm B";

I've never heard of, let alone met people with, many of these names. Kenyatta, Jael, Gentry, Aven, Daylin.

Presumably named after Jomo Kenyatta, who was Kenyas first president in the 60s and 70s.

I can't really tell you why that name took off, maybe due to some of these Americans, who were presumably named after the Kenyan president?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenyatta_(given_name)

Just for your information : Kenya’s 1st and current (4th) presidents are named Kenyatta. But they're the source of that name, anyway.

That's a last name though, not a first name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jomo_Kenyatta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uhuru_Kenyatta

If you are the first man to use a name, it matters less where you decide to put it, first or last.

I've heard those names before or variations of them but the one that threw me off was Kirby as a girls name. I can honestly say I've never met/read/heard of a woman named Kirby.

Come to Utah. All kinds of unusual names are given to kids there.

What's weird is that we don't get any sense of popularity, and a lot of the names here are not very popular spellings.

I suspect popularity would yield pretty different insights, especially if you could see more "sounds like" patterns.

For example, my name: Tristan, isn't on the list, but Tristyn is. Tristan is _much_ more common.

I found this site that also provides some insight that I think is the same SSA data, that's relatively easy to play with: http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Tristan-name-popularity.html

Ratios of boys:girls in 2018:

- Tristan 84:1 3833 total - Tristyn 2:1 99 total

Similarly:

- Austyn: 342 total, 1:3 b:g ratio - Austin: 4778 total, 36:1 ratio

It's still interesting, and fun to dive into the different ways you can look at it. It's like, the more "uncommon" the mispelling, the more people are willing to switch gender, perhaps?

I think that in your examples "Austyn" and "Tristyn", the POINT of the "y" replacing "i" is to signal that the name is feminine. Namely, you're having a girl but want to name her Austin, but not have her be assumed to be male. Therefore, roughly 40% of the time you choose Austyn with a "y" (if my calculations from your ratio are right; 85 girls Austyn, 129 girls Austin).

Could be, but I don't think it holds that consistently in the U.S., which is where this data is from. I'd still guess the less common the spelling, the more likely it's gender neutral, regardless of "gender flags":

More popular, strongly feminine: http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Sydney-name-popularity.html

Less popular, and used to be very popular male name, now mostly female: http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Sidney-name-popularity.html

The prom king and queen at my high school had the first names Tracey and Tracy respectively. Paris is an interesting case as it is featured in Romeo and Juliet as a male name but seems to be mostly a female name now, at least in its Parris variant.

Long before Shalespeare, Paris is also a male in ancient Greek mythology. (No relation to the name of the city of Paris BTW.)

Meanwhile, to the Greeks, Troy was a city, but to us, a Chad.

I noticed that a lot of these unisex and gender-switching names are geographical in some way. Sydney, Chelsea, Austyn, Brighton, Raleigh, Milan. Also Native American tribes, like Lakota and Cree.

I was just thinking about this the other night... my waitress's name was Leslie and I remember hearing that it had been predominantly a male name. Maybe that's not accurate, I didn't see it in the list. Regardless, it's interesting (but not surprising, really) to me that shifting masculine to feminine is way more common than vice versa. I wonder how universal that is across cultures.

Oh yeah, Leslie Lamport!

It might depend on the spelling. In the UK, Leslie is a boy's name and Lesley is a girl's name, same pronunciation.

I actually think the first chart is most telling. Since they are ordered by popularity, the names which had a visible male presence (Kelly, Kim, Riley, Avery) are what I would call 'switched'. Most people would have identified those as masculine at one point. Many of the others are too obscure to most Americans, so they would not have a preconceived gender attachment.

As a man named “Lyndsy”, this is interesting :)

I know much of the story of my name. I’m named after my great-grandfather, with first and middle names reversed. His middle name was “Lindsey”, after his grandmother’s maiden name. (... and back and back and back ...)

I named my eldest daughter Lynzy, to continue the tradition. I’ve apologized for her having to go through life with a “boy’s name” :)

Does the name have to get one letter shorter each generation as well?

> I named my eldest daughter Lynzy, to continue the tradition.

And that's why I always ask patients how to spell their name, no matter how common it sounds...

Yep. I wouldn’t have done that, but my own name varies from the historical spelling as well.

My wife is a Linsey; she jokes that her parents "couldn't afford the D".

Back and back and back... to a clan in Scotland? (One branch of my wife's family is goes back to Clan Lindsay.)

Yes. I can trace it back to David, Bishop of Ross Lindsay.

So what caused that very short spike in "Jaime" as a girls name? Looks like it might have occurred right around 1960.

I'm usually pretty good with obscure trivia and this one has me stumped. The only thing I can think of is the show The Bionic Women. The character in the show was named Jaime Sommers but that show didn't come out until '76.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Sommers_(The_Bionic_Wo...

And this data suggests the spike is around the date of that show: https://www.babycenter.com/baby-names-jaime-8765.htm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Lee_Curtis also

Something about US first names is always puzzling to me because there is a much larger space of names than what there is in Europe for example. Not even talking about exotic ones only. Names like "Justice" are pretty much unheard of in Europe.

In Europe? We have different languages with different names, pretty sure there are more names and variations here. As for weird names like Justice, we get those too

What surprises me about American first names is how many sound like surnames to me: Harrison and Taylor are the two most famous examples, but I'm sure there are more.

That's because many of them are surnames. Parts of the US (namely the South) had/have a tradition of naming boys with their mothers' maiden names.

At the risk of turning an innocent topic into a political discussion, I wonder how much of this trend can be explained by societal privilege. Ie, parents (consciously or subconsciously) want their daughters to benefit from appearing male (at least on paper) and so give them ambiguous or masculine names. And of course, the same parents would do the exact opposite for their sons, by not selecting any name that might be ambiguous in any way.

Is that really a thing in the US though?

Yep.

For a simple non-U.S. example, consider J. K. Rowling, who was forced to invent an initialized pen name by her publisher.

A tradition/need that's been seen all the way back to 1847 [1], when 'Jane Eyre', 'Wuthering Heights', and 'Agnes Grey' were all published by women writing under male pseudonyms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bront%C3%AB_famil...

Why wouldn't it be?

I have a friend who did exactly this, giving his daughter a gender neutral name to help her avoid discrimination. It makes a lot of sense to me and would guess this is not uncommon.

It also reminds of a study I read about a while back where the researches tried sending out resumes that were all identical except that half had very common names and half had names that are more commonly African American. Probably unsurprisingly, the first set of names received more interviews.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

>To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase.

Just remember that there are similar studies going both way depending on context. For job resumes you would want a male name for a slightly higher interview count, while in any interaction with the legal system you want a female name to get better results from custody battles or when accused of a crime. In school-parent relation a female name is perceived as a better parent than a male, while at the doctor it depend on the gender of the doctor. Most psychologists are female so a female patient name gives a small benefit, with the opposite being true for specialties where the majority of doctors are male.

I have an alternative explaination for some of the names. Usually feminine names are longer--often just longer versions of the male equivalent.

Think Patrick vs Patricia, Jesse vs Jessica, Robert vs Roberta etc. It seems a lot of the gender switching names started as short forms of longer names, but then just became full names. Eg Bobby, Jackie, Jessie.

Is societal privilege even falsifiable? Can it explain anything? (Or rather, can it be made to explain anything and everything?)

Sure. Look for example at studies of resumes with “black sounding” and “white sounding” names.

I don't doubt there are definitions of privilege which are falsifiable, as those pertaining to discrimination. But those are seldom used, and when challenged, the claimants fall back to some abstract unfalsifiable definition, i.e., a motte and bailey. Given that, perhaps it would be clearer if we stuck to a term that is clearly falsifiable, such as 'discrimination'.

And as for discrimination, it's difficult to study, and a lot of these bedrock studies/theories never even found anything substantial to begin with (the implicit association test, the blind orchestra auditions study, etc) and of course all of the others that have failed to replicate. Never mind that we are fond of using data from the 30s-80s as indicative of attitudes in 2019. Maybe we can finally begin to question whether social science has a groupthink problem?

> I don't doubt there are definitions of privilege which are falsifiable, as those pertaining to discrimination. But those are seldom used

Discrimination, both subtle and overt, are the most common forms of privilege. Why do you think it is seldom used?

Because there is very little supporting evidence for discrimination of any kind that could justify the “privilege” hoopla, and every time you press someone on their meaning of “privilege” they retreat from the “discrimination” definition to some abstract, probably circular definition (e.g., “men are privileged because there is no sexism against them; you can’t be sexist against men by definition because men are privileged”).

> Because there is very little supporting evidence for discrimination of any kind that could justify the “privilege” hoopla

The other poster provided significant evidence of discrimination

> https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

> To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase

Our daughter has an ambiguous first name and an obviously feminine middle name, partially for exactly this reason (but also because we like the name).

I disagree, I just think it's far easier for femininity to coop masculine concepts than the reverse. Just in my personal view, it can be seen as "cute" for a girl to have a masculine name which sort of juxtaposes their femininity against a previously masculine name.

Also in my experience, there is a lot more at stake for a young boy with a "girl's" name than for a young girl with a "boy's" name. Feel free to contradict me if you have the opposite experience. But I feel that boys would be teased much harder, and their masculinity would be called into question throughout their life simply based on their name.

I feel like you're agreeing with the previous poster: "masculinity would be called into question throughout their life", and "far easier for femininity to coop[t] masculine concepts than the reverse." That's exactly what the previous poster said.

(Check out the story of Steve Shirley for a computer-world related example.)

are we looking at the same post?

GP: girls can benefit from some aspects of male privilege (the parts where only a name is given) by taking a male name

parent: masculinity is more rigid in its ostracizing of feminine ideas

Those are facets of the same thing, one is just more narrow than the other. They certainly don’t contradict each other.

I think you and the parent post are looking at two angles of the same object. The societal pressures that would incentivize masculine names are the same ones that would encourage teasing of a boy with a "girl's name."

True, they could both be factors. Gender bias in both cases.

I love how the article goes through a thought process while analyzing the data, and not just showing the final iteration (as many research papers tend to do).

The Anglosphere is weird if you come from a culture with strongly established gendered name standards.

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