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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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).

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?

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

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