US boy names that became girl names and vice versa (namedaisy.com)

156 pointsby xoobdev4 hours ago167 comments

billyp-rva 3 hours ago

> 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.

zamadatix 2 hours ago

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.

wredcoll an hour ago

I think there's something to this, but also you've got to think about the cultural standards where "female" is considered "abnormal".

e.g. you have "toys" and "girl toys". "clothes" and "girl clothes" and such. It's not everywhere or everything but there is a trend.

smelendez an hour ago

Yeah, a woman wearing pants to an office job became totally normal. A man wearing a dress or skirt would be assumed to be transitioning gender or wearing a costume.

rightnutwingjob 26 minutes ago

> also you've got to think about

We really don’t.

And shouldn’t.

boringg an hour ago

That is the pattern. Rarely would you have a baby boy using a women's name. Broadly speaking there is a general stigma within society going the other direction then women adopting male things.

sandworm101 44 minutes ago

Marion Morrison was a definitive male role model.

jmaw 2 hours ago

> 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.

conductr 2 hours ago

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. Since 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). Definitely a top 3 most common for last several centuries

vforgione an hour ago

Anecdata: I’m a guy and a III. My son almost was a IV but we chose another first name and used my (and my dad’s and my grandfather’s) name for his middle name. My great grandfather had a different name, but I think his dad and maybe grandfather had the same name as me.

conductr an hour ago

I’d agree the trend is waning if that’s what you’re getting at but I think it is baked into the history of this dataset and is also still significantly more common for boys than girls

Also, IV is really quite rare for boys too. Junior still super common.

rightnutwingjob 28 minutes ago

Why would anyone make their kids legal name include “Junior”.

How does that work when they’re 60 with grandkids?

k12sosse 14 minutes ago

they become Jay-Are

georgeburdell an hour ago

Not to offend, but I think it has declined because this naming of Jr, III, and so on has come to be associated with poor or rural people. For what it’s worth, I have a relative who is a IV

cogogo an hour ago

Never heard that framing before. In New England the practice is associated with blue-blood wealth.

rf15 37 minutes ago

coming from europe: in my experience "fancy names" are either blue blood wealth OR regular people wanting to look like blue blood wealth. So I feel you both have a point here.

JumpCrisscross 25 minutes ago

This appears not to have been rigorously studied. Anecdotally, the further west one goes in America the higher the likelihood a suffix indicates low SES.

conductr 10 minutes ago

Well it’s likely the adoption by the Latinx. I think that demo grows as you move west. In Texas it’s become more common in that demo and the redneck whites. The monied still have it but more commonly go towards super preppy names like Tripp, Shep, Archer, Preston. A common theme I see if you dig deeper is they name one of the boys the mom’s maiden surname. But in general, surnames as first names is very common in this demo. I mostly exist in this demo of WASPs and my wife has I think 4+ cousins named in the mom maiden name format, I didn’t realize it was a bigger thing until we had kids and learned a lot of them also did this. My family wasn’t monied so I wasn’t really exposed to it until adulthood.

macintux an hour ago

> I have no data but feel that boys tend to get the family names and biblical names (in US anyways).

Curiously, in the last few months in the U.S. I've met a Tamar and an Esther, both women given family names that were drawn from the bible.

mbowcut2 4 minutes ago

I thought girls didn't use junior, III, etc. because traditionally girls adopt their husband's last name, so they would no longer have the same full name as their mother.

rightnutwingjob 32 minutes ago

> the same pattern held in the opposite direction.

That seems like a really awkward way to describe the observation.

Wouldn’t the “same” pattern be if the increase was due to greater uptake in the opposite sex.

ecshafer 2 hours ago

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.

cvhc 2 hours ago

Yeah immigration and mix of similar names from different languages could also be reasons for the (at least perceived) shifts.

nostrademons 2 hours ago

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.

crooked-v an hour ago

Going by the peak time on the chart, Jean flipped over fast right about when Jean-Luc entered public consciousness.

mikepurvis an hour ago

I was going to say the same about Jean; I think that one at least is hard to really draw conclusions from without additional data like languages spoken at home.

Anecdotally, the boy->girl names are almost all very popular names where I've met multiple each of those across different ages, whereas the other two categories feel like they have a lot more down-list entries.

dotancohen 25 minutes ago

Kim is another good one - I've met several Korean men named Kim.

Though I'm not 100% sure they weren't using their family name as their everyday identity name (the Kims I met were not related).

Fnoord 2 hours ago

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.

stasomatic 2 hours ago

The one that always trips me up is when a man is a Stacey.

busymom0 2 hours ago

I had to call a customer once whose name was Courtney and it tripped me up when it turned out to be a male..

bityard an hour ago

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.)

IncreasePosts 2 hours ago

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.

Fnoord an hour ago

True, good native and traditional cultutal exceptions of a rule of thumb. Speaking for myself (NL) we have a small amount of Italian names and heritage (also due to Catholicism), and say NYC would have much more Italian descendants.

Also, as someone who saw quite some football (non-US version), I ofcourse am familiar with a lot of names. For example, Andrea Pirlo. We also learn some via history at school, since Italy plays a prominent role in Europe's history. Regarding Nicola, people might be familiar with Nikola Tesla (the 'c' in this case, sounds like 'k') and it is just a variant of 'Nico', 'Nicole', 'Nicolas'. Then there's some dude at FIFA, 'Gianni' which is a variant of 'Jean', 'Jan', 'Jeanne', 'Janet', 'Jannie', 'Janine', etc. I could go on about Gianluigi Buffon...

What I just remind myself with regards to Italian is it tends to add a vowel at end of a word or name, but it often doesn't sound same in English or my native tongue (Dutch).

bsimpson 38 minutes ago

Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.

Michele and Daniele look like misspellings of Michelle and Danielle though. I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.

casta 32 minutes ago

My name is Daniele (I'm from Italy), and I've been living in NY for a while. My real estate attorney name was Daniele as well (she's a woman,) it was extremely confusing at closing time.

Also, fun fact, I got invited to a ton Women in Tech stuff. I even got recruited to a company that was proud of having > 50% women in their teams. I assume that was because I was working on an OSS project (Chromium) and I had no avatar there.

Also, in the two FAANG companies I worked at I was added to women groups a few times.

Groxx an hour ago

Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that. Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling, which can go either way (may follow that culture's patterns, may not, highly varied).

Ends in vowel (sound) = female: probably mostly true, in that I strongly suspect it's >50%, but it's unreliable enough that I'd avoid trying to base any assumptions off it.

Names really follow no rules at all here. For both good and bad. E.g. most recently I ran across a "La-sia" pronounced "ladashsia". If it's spelled vat-ik'Nff and pronounced "King George" and they're female, then that's what's correct.

motionlessveloc 40 minutes ago

See https://www.reddit.com r/tragedies for all sorts of, uhh, inventive spellings and names.

tancop 36 minutes ago

> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling, which can go either way

Or the names of biblical prophets like Ezra or Elisha. Not very popular today but you can find a lot of them in 19th century records.

gus_massa 24 minutes ago

I mostly agree, but for example Andrea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea is a masculine name in Italian and a feminine name in Spanish. Here in Argentina it's mostly masculine, but if someone has many Italian ancestors, it may be masculine.

> It is part of the Italian male names ending in a, some others being Elia (Elias), Enea (Aeneas), Luca (Lucas), Mattia (Matthias), Nicola (Nicholas), Tobia (Tobias).

phillc73 16 minutes ago

> Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that.

Which places? I guess I ask because your next sentence:

> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling

Which makes me wonder if you meant "US places", because I can think of a few male names, which maybe categorised as "foreign" if you're in the US, that end in "a".

e.g. Csaba (pronounced "Chubba") is a reasonably common Hungarian name.

And some not so "foreign" ones, albeit mostly with Biblical roots, like Joshua and Ezra.

triceratops an hour ago

Lindsey (as well as Ashley, Tracy, Kelly, among others) are all, I believe, last names that became given names. They skewed female over time because they end with a vowel.

Ashley Williams is the name of two American actresses as well as two male soccer players (Welsh and Liberian) and a male boxer (also Welsh).

bigstrat2003 an hour ago

When I was a kid, I was very confused by the names of Fleetwood Mac band members. It really threw me for a loop that they had a Lindsay who is a dude, and a Stevie who is a girl, both counter to my intuition about names.

graemep 34 minutes ago

Stevie is Stephanie which has always been very much a girl's name. Abbreviations have a tendency to collide.

bsimpson 37 minutes ago

There was a boy in high school named Ash (he was probably class of 2002). He tried hard to not let anyone know it was short for Ashley.

dotancohen 24 minutes ago

Ash is a robot.

literallyanythi 15 minutes ago

Ash is a pokemon trainer. (I watched Alien and still had to search up your comment)

kleiba2 7 minutes ago

I met this Australian actor in person once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Zukerman

bee_rider 9 minutes ago

IDK about the politician, but I bet 80% of the Lindsey’s out there are named after the Fleetwood Mac guitarist, so obviously that name transcend any petty gender limitations.

srean 4 minutes ago

There is Lindsey Buckingham. (Way underrated)

petemc_ 2 hours ago

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.

andix 2 hours ago

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.

Jtsummers 2 hours ago

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).

zahlman 2 hours ago

…Why would it be surprising for the USA not to have such a requirement?

cubefox an hour ago

The US has unusually common unisex naming. Most other countries don't.

triceratops an hour ago

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.

Vrondi an hour ago

In the USA, you can name your kid what you want. This avoids one ethnic group requiring everyone to have a name from their tradition.

macintux an hour ago

I'm not sure "a lot" is accurate, although certainly more than I expected.

Looks like Europe has several countries with legal requirements, although the trend there is moving the other direction, plus Chile.

stevekemp an hour ago

Finland has some naming rules, but they don't necessarily apply to everyone in the country because they're rules for naming people born here, rather than those who later moved here.

There is a public index of forenames and surnames which I learned about when I was with my pregnant wife, and back then I was obsessively searching for my/our surname to see it increase by one when our newborn was registered and became "official".

Apparently within the whole of Finland there 22 men with the same surname as me, and 25 women. 21 of these people are in Finland and 26 are abroad but known.

Interestingly if I go to the forename search and look for people named "Steve" there are < 5 women with that name (i.e. non-zero, but the number masked for privacy reasons):

https://nimipalvelu.dvv.fi/en/forename-search?name=Steve

I'm curious about the origin there, though of course I've seen Steve -> Steffan -> Stephany, and similar translations in the past.

BeetleB 2 hours ago

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.

zahlman 2 hours ago

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?

zamadatix 2 hours ago

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 as common as a male name) and there should have been in the same ballpark as as many male "Hilary"s of the same age.

https://namedaisy.com/us/name/Hilary

ks2048 13 minutes ago

Hilary Putnam (famous male philosopher) was born in 1926. I imagine soon after this generation is flipped.

ReptileMan 2 hours ago

Because it's there...

LorenPechtel 2 hours ago

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.

triceratops an hour ago

Here's my favorite "Lauren"*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Bush

*solely because her legal, married name is Lauren Bush Lauren. She actually changed it, which is gold (and honestly very sweet).

lrivers an hour ago

Loren adjacent. In high school my girlfriend was Lauren and mine is Lorin. Friends over pronounced our names to differentiate. It doesn’t bother me to get misgendered, either. It never lasts past hearing my voice or seeing me, though.

macintux an hour ago

> As an adult I routinely get misgendered, but it's a so-what to me.

You're fortunate that the spelling is distinct. The story of Kim O'Grady is depressing.

https://www.thecut.com/2013/07/maybe-you-should-add-mister-t...

YeGoblynQueenne an hour ago

As a non-native English speaker I've learned never to gender English speakers from their names. I mean in emails and so on, when I haven't had a chance to meet them. No "Ask Ashley if she would like to join us...". "Would Ashley like to join us?" is the safe option.

snarf21 an hour ago

As someone with an pretty unusual name, I think kids will always find a reason to make fun of you and it isn't always just the name.

True Story: My mom was a 2nd grade teacher for 30 years and in the 70s had a student with very 'hippie" style parents. They named their son Log Cabin. You can imagine how that went over in elementary school.

ethagnawl an hour ago

Did he have a brother named Sue? If so, I might know the reason ...

> And he said, "Son, this world is rough

> And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough

> And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.

> So I give ya that name and I said goodbye

> I knew you'd have to get tough or die

> And it's the name that helped to make you strong."

Johnny Cash - A Boy Named Sue

graemep 31 minutes ago

Hilary is a boys name that became a girls name. It is also a surname (although the latter usually has a double L).

graemep 26 minutes ago

I am not sure what to make of this, but the names there are ones that sound very American to me.

However the most popular names in the US are not that different from those in the UK, with few of the girls' names sounding American or unusual: https://namedaisy.com/blog/us-vs-uk-top-100-baby-names-2025 and not that many of the boys'.

myself248 2 hours ago

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.

ekzy 2 hours ago

Yep, my wife and I have the same middle name: Jean. I’m French and she’s British :)

mrtimo 34 minutes ago

This reminds of of this tool [1]. It's a wasm that shows "overrepresented baby names". Choose a state, choose a time frame, it will tell you which names were given more in that state compared to all other states. Ever heard of an "Alaska Name" or an "Idaho Name"... find them with this tool.

[1] https://docs.malloydata.dev/malloyyo-babynames/over-represen...

cortesoft 3 hours ago

I feel like a lot of these can be tied to one famous person with the name causing the gender to flip.

jtommy14 2 hours ago

I've noticed more girls are being named Parker these days. My 1yo son is named Parker. He's holding the line.

nkrisc 2 hours ago

The trend of surnames as given names is stranger to me than traditional gender reversal of names.

trelane an hour ago

Surnames or occupations (Tanner, Cooper, etc)

kleiba2 4 minutes ago

You never know, OP's son might one day work as a valet.

triceratops an hour ago

They go hand-in-hand. Surnames aren't gendered. Names that reverse gender are often surnames used as given names.

"John" or "Matthew" are probably never going to become female. Nor will "Elizabeth" or "Katherine" become male.

"Spencer" was male when Spencer Tracy was a big name. Today it could go either way. As a family name it relates to the profession of a steward.

frankus an hour ago

A surname ending in “son” could be seen as at least a little bit gendered.

triceratops 42 minutes ago

You'd think so, but Allison is firmly in the girls camp today, at least in the US (Liverpool FC's male goalkeeper Alisson Becker is Brazilian). Madison is also more associated with girls.

TheOtherHobbes 11 minutes ago

Surnames are gendered in some languages, typically when they're defined as gendered adjectives.

In Polish '...ski' is masculine and '...ska' is feminine. The prefix stays the same, so a brother and sister have slightly different surnames. (Like 'Wolski' vs 'Wolska.')

In the US some immigrants forgot this, so you get American women with a '...ski' surname.

triceratops 5 minutes ago

Good point. I think Russian surnames are the same right? (Ivanov/Ivanova etc.)

eclipticplane an hour ago

s/Never trust a man with two first names/Never trust a man with two last names/.

UncleSlacky an hour ago

He can't lose!

nobody9999 31 minutes ago

>I've noticed more girls are being named Parker these days. My 1yo son is named Parker. He's holding the line.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was related to the character[0] portrayed by Beth Riesgraf[2] on Leverage[1]

[0] https://leverage.fandom.com/wiki/Parker

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_(American_TV_series)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_Riesgraf

goda90 2 hours ago

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.

Terr_ 2 hours ago

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

In the series, Miles having a name meaning "soldier" is, er, persistently thematically significant.

YeGoblynQueenne 44 minutes ago

Wow. Kind of blast from the past. I haven't read that btw, how good is it?

al_borland an hour ago

I'm surprised Ryan wasn't on the list. Traditionally a boys name, but I know at least 3 women named Ryan. Maybe it hasn't reached a tipping point yet.

tancop 34 minutes ago

The most famous Ryans today are Reynolds and Gosling. I think that's enough to keep it masculine for one more generation.

xnx 42 minutes ago

The data sounds interesting, but the visualization is so bad that I one-slopped an alternative: https://www.alwaysleaveanote.com/gender-swapping-names/

rsync an hour ago

Just a data point from the SFBA ...

There are a lot of Ronins. Lots.

Sometime 8-12 years ago, dads in Marin got a glint in their eye:

"My son ... the wayward samurai ..."

onlyrealcuzzo an hour ago

Depending on whether we model the data linearly or exponentially (like the famous Tohoku University study that found everyone in Japan will be named Sato by 2531)...

The US may reach the 100% Boy Name Ronin-ification anywhere between 2057 or 10,327 AD.

sota_pop 2 hours ago

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.

twoodfin 2 hours ago

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.

jmaw an hour ago

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

kibwen 2 hours ago

Common nicknames eventually just become given names on their own, like "Jack" or "John" or "Alex".

bsimpson 41 minutes ago

My brother was named Morgan in 1988. I think he's the only male Morgan he knows, but often had class with girls of the same name.

rolandog 2 hours ago

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.

childev 2 hours ago

Interesting data. Nightmare color scale for the colorblind.

xnx 2 hours ago

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.

poncho_romero an hour ago

Yeah I can't read the charts at all.

axus 2 hours ago

Most surprising was "Mario" becoming shared. "Maria/Mario" seemed inherently gendered, based on the last letter.

bhouston 2 hours ago

I think it says "Marlo"? Not "Mario". L, not I.

fsckboy 2 hours ago

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

brewmarche an hour ago

Interestingly if I remember correctly they have different origins, Maria is a biblical name, while Mario comes from Latin (which can decline Marius to Maria, but that’s a different word)

bilsbie 2 hours ago

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.

lkramer 2 hours ago

Probably more likely that they don't get the interview because the person reviewing their CV assumed they were a woman...

switchbak an hour ago

Ha, you had me at "person". As if people review resumes anymore!

trelane an hour ago

Surprised Sue wasn't mentioned. I had heard that boys had started being called Sue (sample size of 1, but very prominent).

Aperocky 2 hours ago

I'm just really surprised that 21% of Lynn's are boys.

astura 17 minutes ago

Missing: Shannon and Ryan.

ethagnawl an hour ago

A wonderful example of how gender is a social construct.

YeGoblynQueenne an hour ago

In English, maybe. Several other languages have gendered nouns, so names are not interchangeable. For example "Ιωάννης" in Greek is the male form of "John" given exclusively to male children, whereas "Ιωάννα" is the female form given exclusively to female children. No exceptions. AFAIU if a person wished to change their name from "Ιωάννης" to "Ιωάννα" they would have to go to court and change their birth gender also.

JumpCrisscross 18 minutes ago

Legal systems and language are a social construct. Your example doesn’t really disprove the assertion. (I’m not sure how these data promote the hypothesis either.)

Danox 2 hours ago

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.

scottyah an hour ago

It's super hard to keep track of, I have an app that's designed to help couples name their baby, and I always wanted to stay away from hard-defined gender stuff, but people still want boy/girl categories. So many are both, but to varying degrees. I ended up using a boy/girl/unisex selector, and had Jev tag all the names. It's especially when dealing with other countries, languages, and customs. At the end of the day, it's mostly easier for the user to just swipe left on a name rather than try to pre-eliminate it from their pool.