> Of the 42 names that moved toward girls, 34 were driven mainly by an increase among girls, rather than a decline among boys.
> Surprisingly, the same pattern held in the opposite direction. Of the 12 names that moved toward boys, 9 shifted mainly because fewer girls were receiving them, rather than because more boys were. In other words, whichever way a name moved, the biggest change usually came from girls.
This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways). It's rare to hear of a girl named Elizabeth III or Mary Junior but quite common for those concepts in boys. So I think the boy names are heavily weighted on probably the most popular ~25 or so names. So girl names are more free to follow whatever is fashionable at the time, trends move faster.
My son is named after his grandfather, and it's an overly common name in English (American and British)
> This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
Interesting, I wonder what causes this? In the US, is more common to name the first son after the father. Given this data comes from US social security information, that definitely has an impact.
It seems there are lots of cases across the board where "women adopt traditionally male thing" has become the norm in this timeframe but not many where "men adopt traditionally female thing" at quite the same rate or scale.
There are a few names I think are being confused. Jan, short for Janice is a female name, but Jan in Central / Eastern Europe as a form of John is masculine. Jean the female name and Jean the french male name are different.
This is part of what they mean by girl names driving the shift. You have a traditional ethnic name that may be masculine or feminine and has a baseline low level of popularity. Then you have a popular female name that rapidly gains and loses its popularity. The effect on the mix is that it's shifting from masculine to feminine, but really you should look at it as a newly-popular female name being layered on top of the traditional name. And you can often see this in the timescale, with a clear pop-culture trigger leading to the rising girl name.
Looking at just part of the data, I can see this with Arya (Stark, Game of Thrones), Paris (Hilton), Stevie (Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac), Dakota (Fanning), and Tatum (O'neal), and the masculine trend also relates to the fading of generationally-popular names like Jean (Silent/Boomer), Pat (Boomer), Joan (Silent/Boomer), Courtney (Gen-X/Xennial), etc.
I suspect this is a big driver of the switch. Parents that do not want to give their boys a name that will cause issues later on.
Back in school it wasn't a problem, people knew "Loren" was male, "Lauren" was female. Now, an awful lot of people don't. It's an uncommon enough name that even if you were around back when that's how it worked you very well might not have known it.
As an adult I routinely get misgendered, but it's a so-what to me.
How "not long ago" are you thinking of? Clinton was first a major figure in the 90s (and we also had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fresh_Prince_of_Bel-Air ). And Clinton herself is from the baby boom generation; what male Hil(l)arys from that cohort do you have in mind?
Looks like it flipped in ~the 40s, by the ~60s had become rarer as a male name, and was pretty much a flop as a male name after the ~80s. So Clinton was born just when it started to take off for females (and in general - it was never aas common as a male name).
It's kind of surprising that this is even allowed. A lot of countries require at least the first given name to match the gender. Some names might be deemed suitable for both genders.
It's a family name that became a first name. We associate names ending with a vowel sound with the female gender. Other than that there's nothing gendered about "Hilary" as a first name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_(name) - It's not an exclusively female name. But in the US, you can give a kid pretty much any name you want (see the names Musk gives his kids these days).
But Jean (English name, like Jeannie) and Jean (French form of John) are entirely different names, with different pronunciations, that happen to share the same spelling.
My biggest WTF on this (as a foreigner) was the late Lindsey Graham. I always knew Lindsey/Lindsay as a female name.
Either way, peeking through the list, seems to me names which end with a vowel are usually feminine. However, there's a caveat: names end up shortened, and over time even those get shortened.
'Brit', 'Britney' for 'Brittany'.
'Gerry' or 'Geri' or 'Ger' for 'Gareth' (Dutch variant: 'Gerrit'),
'Pat', 'Patty' for 'Patrick', 'Patricia'.
'Pen', 'Penny' for 'Penelope'
'Ash' for 'Ashley'.
'Tash' or 'Tasha' for 'Natasha', 'Nata(s)cha' (a variant of Nathan/Nathaniel?)
'Toni', 'Tony', or 'Ton' for 'Antonia', 'Anton', or 'Antonius'.
Skimming through the quick examples I came up with, one thing stands out: if it ends with an 'a', feminine. I believe this stems from Latin? It also appears Brittany is a very British example, whereas say 'Tony' stems from a Catholic background. People with that background get very traditional names, but they're always practically shortened. Annoyingly, you'd have to mention your complete name on say a form, but otherwise you get a wider choice since you have like three names, and they're relatively long so more variety to pick from.
Andrea, Simone, Nicola, Michele, Daniele in Italian are all male names, but English speakers would probably assume the person is female from the name alone.
I was very much shocked to see a feminine version of my name used IIRC on Dead Or Alive 4 (DOA4), not knowing the backstory: I think it was a character called Leon was promising to avenge his dead girlfriend, Rolande.
I've wondered if the women that have carried the name have liked it? In my mind, it's always sounded very blunt so as to be feminine, but I recognize I'm heavily biased when it comes to my own name.
Most interesting thing that stands out to me is the number of names that appear to be what I would consider an abbreviation of a more traditional name.
e.g. “Pat” is cited, but doesn’t specify whether that refers to Patricia or Patrick.
Came here to say the same. Anyone doing data visualization should think long and hard before using something beside a line or bar chart. Almost everything else is worse in multiple ways.
I’d be curious if men with female names get rejected out of a lot of job interviews since the employer may have thought they chose a female for DEI and then a man shows up?
Or maybe it’s a good way to get your foot in the door in todays job market.
A name I was surprised by was someone I know naming their daughter Miles/Myles, which is such a male name in my mind. It might even be based on the Latin word for soldier. It's not one I've seen used for a girl anywhere else, yet.
for people from languages that mark gender with an ending (romance languages for instance), putting the "wrong" ending something like a noun would sound odd or change the meaning
I guess it's eternally stuck in the 90s. I didn't see Perl in a long time now. 10-15 years ago it was still everywhere.
edit: No, it's stuck in the 80s: "The data comes from a 5% sampling of Social Security card applications with dates of birth from January 1980 through December 1989"
Such a thing will often happen as the result of a celebrity having the name. For instance, famed Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, whose real name was Stephanie.
Years ago, one of the broadcasters for a Red Sox game was doing some ad read about some event Stevie Nicks was going to be at, but they read her name as "Steve Nicks" instead. Someone else in the booth corrected them, and they responded "I know him well, and I call him Steve". A fan apparently sent them a giant poster of Stevie Nicks, and the others put it up in the booth and teased him about it relentlessly during the next game.
Interestingly enough, Lindsey, like Lindsey Buckingham, the guitarist of Fleetwood Mac, became a more popular girl's name during Fleetwood Mac's heyday.
I mean, this is US-centric data, but it is probably a shortening of 'Stephanie' or 'Stefanie' [1], the female variant of 'Stephan' or 'Stefan'. It stems from Greek, apparently: Stephanos. Its variant are used entirely throughout Europe, from Portugal to Russia.
To my Irish ear, these are two completely different names, not even slightly similar. (They're also etymologically unrelated.) It blew my mind when discussions on r/namenerds revealed that many Americans consider these names similar or even identical.
In the past there were no hard associations between sexes and gender and it was possible to find boys wearing some pink clothing, but it was never the case that people associated pink with boys and blue with girls.
There are some limited examples that contribute to the misunderstanding. For example blue is often associated with the Virgin Mary and red (not pink) was considered a manly color often worn by warriors (e.g. the British, the Romans, etc).
I'm not sure what you mean by "natural" coloring, but the association you're describing has also reversed over time; i.e., pink was considered masculine and blue was considered feminine.
I have heard and I do believe that there are countries that use other colors for babies, but wouldn't trust wikipedia nor its selective sources on any topic like gender; wikipedia is no longer enslaved to the truth.
> Of the 42 names that moved toward girls, 34 were driven mainly by an increase among girls, rather than a decline among boys.
> Surprisingly, the same pattern held in the opposite direction. Of the 12 names that moved toward boys, 9 shifted mainly because fewer girls were receiving them, rather than because more boys were. In other words, whichever way a name moved, the biggest change usually came from girls.
This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways). It's rare to hear of a girl named Elizabeth III or Mary Junior but quite common for those concepts in boys. So I think the boy names are heavily weighted on probably the most popular ~25 or so names. So girl names are more free to follow whatever is fashionable at the time, trends move faster.
My son is named after his grandfather, and it's an overly common name in English (American and British)
> This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
Interesting, I wonder what causes this? In the US, is more common to name the first son after the father. Given this data comes from US social security information, that definitely has an impact.
It seems there are lots of cases across the board where "women adopt traditionally male thing" has become the norm in this timeframe but not many where "men adopt traditionally female thing" at quite the same rate or scale.
There are a few names I think are being confused. Jan, short for Janice is a female name, but Jan in Central / Eastern Europe as a form of John is masculine. Jean the female name and Jean the french male name are different.
Yeah immigration and mix of similar names from different languages could also be reasons for the (at least perceived) shifts.
This is part of what they mean by girl names driving the shift. You have a traditional ethnic name that may be masculine or feminine and has a baseline low level of popularity. Then you have a popular female name that rapidly gains and loses its popularity. The effect on the mix is that it's shifting from masculine to feminine, but really you should look at it as a newly-popular female name being layered on top of the traditional name. And you can often see this in the timescale, with a clear pop-culture trigger leading to the rising girl name.
Looking at just part of the data, I can see this with Arya (Stark, Game of Thrones), Paris (Hilton), Stevie (Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac), Dakota (Fanning), and Tatum (O'neal), and the masculine trend also relates to the fading of generationally-popular names like Jean (Silent/Boomer), Pat (Boomer), Joan (Silent/Boomer), Courtney (Gen-X/Xennial), etc.
There was a guy at my school named Hilary who got awful abuse for it. Always wondered why parents would do such a thing to a child.
I suspect this is a big driver of the switch. Parents that do not want to give their boys a name that will cause issues later on.
Back in school it wasn't a problem, people knew "Loren" was male, "Lauren" was female. Now, an awful lot of people don't. It's an uncommon enough name that even if you were around back when that's how it worked you very well might not have known it.
As an adult I routinely get misgendered, but it's a so-what to me.
Weird comment, given that it was, not long ago, a common name for a male.
I'd wager if it weren't for Clinton, most people would still associate it with men.
How "not long ago" are you thinking of? Clinton was first a major figure in the 90s (and we also had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fresh_Prince_of_Bel-Air ). And Clinton herself is from the baby boom generation; what male Hil(l)arys from that cohort do you have in mind?
Looks like it flipped in ~the 40s, by the ~60s had become rarer as a male name, and was pretty much a flop as a male name after the ~80s. So Clinton was born just when it started to take off for females (and in general - it was never aas common as a male name).
https://namedaisy.com/us/name/Hilary
Because it's there...
It's kind of surprising that this is even allowed. A lot of countries require at least the first given name to match the gender. Some names might be deemed suitable for both genders.
It's a family name that became a first name. We associate names ending with a vowel sound with the female gender. Other than that there's nothing gendered about "Hilary" as a first name.
…Why would it be surprising for the USA not to have such a requirement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_(name) - It's not an exclusively female name. But in the US, you can give a kid pretty much any name you want (see the names Musk gives his kids these days).
But Jean (English name, like Jeannie) and Jean (French form of John) are entirely different names, with different pronunciations, that happen to share the same spelling.
Yep, my wife and I have the same middle name: Jean. I’m French and she’s British :)
My biggest WTF on this (as a foreigner) was the late Lindsey Graham. I always knew Lindsey/Lindsay as a female name.
Either way, peeking through the list, seems to me names which end with a vowel are usually feminine. However, there's a caveat: names end up shortened, and over time even those get shortened.
'Brit', 'Britney' for 'Brittany'.
'Gerry' or 'Geri' or 'Ger' for 'Gareth' (Dutch variant: 'Gerrit'),
'Pat', 'Patty' for 'Patrick', 'Patricia'.
'Pen', 'Penny' for 'Penelope'
'Ash' for 'Ashley'.
'Tash' or 'Tasha' for 'Natasha', 'Nata(s)cha' (a variant of Nathan/Nathaniel?)
'Toni', 'Tony', or 'Ton' for 'Antonia', 'Anton', or 'Antonius'.
Skimming through the quick examples I came up with, one thing stands out: if it ends with an 'a', feminine. I believe this stems from Latin? It also appears Brittany is a very British example, whereas say 'Tony' stems from a Catholic background. People with that background get very traditional names, but they're always practically shortened. Annoyingly, you'd have to mention your complete name on say a form, but otherwise you get a wider choice since you have like three names, and they're relatively long so more variety to pick from.
The one that always trips me up is when a man is a Stacey.
Growing up in the rural midwest, I had no idea Tracy could be a dude's name until I worked with one. (Great guy, btw.)
I had to call a customer once whose name was Courtney and it tripped me up when it turned out to be a male..
Andrea, Simone, Nicola, Michele, Daniele in Italian are all male names, but English speakers would probably assume the person is female from the name alone.
I feel like a lot of these can be tied to one famous person with the name causing the gender to flip.
I've noticed more girls are being named Parker these days. My 1yo son is named Parker. He's holding the line.
The trend of surnames as given names is stranger to me than traditional gender reversal of names.
I'm just really surprised that 21% of Lynn's are boys.
I was very much shocked to see a feminine version of my name used IIRC on Dead Or Alive 4 (DOA4), not knowing the backstory: I think it was a character called Leon was promising to avenge his dead girlfriend, Rolande.
I've wondered if the women that have carried the name have liked it? In my mind, it's always sounded very blunt so as to be feminine, but I recognize I'm heavily biased when it comes to my own name.
Most interesting thing that stands out to me is the number of names that appear to be what I would consider an abbreviation of a more traditional name.
e.g. “Pat” is cited, but doesn’t specify whether that refers to Patricia or Patrick.
These are presumably from Social Security registrations, so reflecting official given names.
Another interesting analysis would be the movement back and forth between full names and their associated common diminutives.
Yes, the data comes from the US Social Security Administration from 1936–2025
Source: The expandable "How we measured it" section at the bottom of the page
Common nicknames eventually just become given names on their own, like "Jack" or "John" or "Alex".
Interesting data. Nightmare color scale for the colorblind.
Came here to say the same. Anyone doing data visualization should think long and hard before using something beside a line or bar chart. Almost everything else is worse in multiple ways.
I’d be curious if men with female names get rejected out of a lot of job interviews since the employer may have thought they chose a female for DEI and then a man shows up?
Or maybe it’s a good way to get your foot in the door in todays job market.
Probably more likely that they don't get the interview because the person reviewing their CV assumed they were a woman...
A name I was surprised by was someone I know naming their daughter Miles/Myles, which is such a male name in my mind. It might even be based on the Latin word for soldier. It's not one I've seen used for a girl anywhere else, yet.
Edited slightly for series spoilers:
> "Well, I wish you every joy," Miles went on [...] He managed a wink. "Name the first one after me, eh?"
> [She] grinned. "I'm not sure she'd appreciate that. Milesanna? Milesia?"
> "Milesia sounds like a disease," Miles admitted, taken aback. "In that case, don't. I wouldn't want her to grow up hating me in absentia."
-- Memory (1996) by Lois McMaster Bujold
Most of the names that flip over seem to be names associated with the gentry class, many of the names seem to be neutral, soft very inoffensive names.
Most surprising was "Mario" becoming shared. "Maria/Mario" seemed inherently gendered, based on the last letter.
I think it says "Marlo"? Not "Mario". L, not I.
Marlo/Marla is also inherently gendered
for people from languages that mark gender with an ending (romance languages for instance), putting the "wrong" ending something like a noun would sound odd or change the meaning
> Failed to verify your browser > > Vercel Security Checkpoint | iad1::1793644520-hvXR6jD3A6jJoFcEhxLm7uNyDy9O2Ibl
Super informative article.
I'm gonna credit George RR Martin with flipping Arya in the mid '90s
Good luck to the Perl function Text::GenderFromName()
Maybe it needs the birthday
I guess it's eternally stuck in the 90s. I didn't see Perl in a long time now. 10-15 years ago it was still everywhere.
edit: No, it's stuck in the 80s: "The data comes from a 5% sampling of Social Security card applications with dates of birth from January 1980 through December 1989"
https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::GenderFromName#REGARDING-THE-...
I'm sure there are a few competing "Falsehoods programmers believe about names" out there by now.
I thought you must be joking. You were not!
Stevie is a girl's name now?
Such a thing will often happen as the result of a celebrity having the name. For instance, famed Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, whose real name was Stephanie.
Years ago, one of the broadcasters for a Red Sox game was doing some ad read about some event Stevie Nicks was going to be at, but they read her name as "Steve Nicks" instead. Someone else in the booth corrected them, and they responded "I know him well, and I call him Steve". A fan apparently sent them a giant poster of Stevie Nicks, and the others put it up in the booth and teased him about it relentlessly during the next game.
The past tense "was" had me at least looking for an obituary. She is still very much alive
I was referring to the Stephanie part in the past tense. I doubt she's gone by that name since she was a child.
But yes, Stevie is very much still alive.
Interestingly enough, Lindsey, like Lindsey Buckingham, the guitarist of Fleetwood Mac, became a more popular girl's name during Fleetwood Mac's heyday.
In the US, boys would abbreviate Stephen or Steven to Steve. Stevie only for a young boy.
I’m not sure what they are measuring here though - if it’s only birth certificates then I’m sure Stevie is dominated by girls for a long time.
With the shift happening right after the 1976–1980 square, I'd assume people named their daughter after Stevie Nicks.
I mean, this is US-centric data, but it is probably a shortening of 'Stephanie' or 'Stefanie' [1], the female variant of 'Stephan' or 'Stefan'. It stems from Greek, apparently: Stephanos. Its variant are used entirely throughout Europe, from Portugal to Russia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie
Now? Let me introduce you to Stevie Nicks.
Don't be silly.
Moon Unit is a girls name.
Stevie is a nickname for the sweetener Stevia.
What about Aaron -> Erin ?
To my Irish ear, these are two completely different names, not even slightly similar. (They're also etymologically unrelated.) It blew my mind when discussions on r/namenerds revealed that many Americans consider these names similar or even identical.
Aaron is Hebrew and Erin is Irish. They just happen to sound the same.
They don't even sound the same, except in some (not all) American accents. They don't sound even remotely similar to me.
Interesting, they sound exactly the same to me, and I cannot even think of how they might sound different to someone else. Care to explain?
Sort of reminds me of the color swap of Pink and Blue for Men and Women.
You're the victim of misinformation.
In the past there were no hard associations between sexes and gender and it was possible to find boys wearing some pink clothing, but it was never the case that people associated pink with boys and blue with girls.
There are some limited examples that contribute to the misunderstanding. For example blue is often associated with the Virgin Mary and red (not pink) was considered a manly color often worn by warriors (e.g. the British, the Romans, etc).
Surprised to not see "Jordan" in there, it's the first one that came to my mind.
Green to orange? Why not blue to pink? I know it is stereotypical, but it is the natural colouring.
I'm not sure what you mean by "natural" coloring, but the association you're describing has also reversed over time; i.e., pink was considered masculine and blue was considered feminine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendered_associations_of_pink_...
I have heard and I do believe that there are countries that use other colors for babies, but wouldn't trust wikipedia nor its selective sources on any topic like gender; wikipedia is no longer enslaved to the truth.