If you believe that a name can have an impact on how people treat you, your future career and if you also like math you should name your daughter (or change your name) to something further down this list:
Isabella 1.21 Anna 1.04 Elizabeth 1.02 Emma 0.97 Jessica 0.93 Samantha 0.83 Sarah 0.78 Olivia 0.74 Hannah 0.70 Emily 0.68 Lauren 0.66 Ashley 0.63 Grace 0.50 Abigail 0.48 Alex 0.28
If you want your daughter to be a beautician, home maker or a monarch the names on the top of the list are fine. Something bothers me about studies like this but I'm not sure if it's just that I don't want things like this to be true or what?! Of course I can't find the article online so I don't really have anything to complain about.
Parents are being warned to think long and hard when choosing names for their babies as research has discovered that girls who are given very feminine names, such as Anna, Emma or Elizabeth, are less likely to study maths or physics after the age of 16, a remarkable study has found.Both subjects, which are traditionally seen as predominantly male, are far more popular among girls with names such as Abigail, Lauren and Ashley, which have been judged as less feminine in a linguistic test. The effect is so strong that parents can set twin daughters off on completely different career paths simply by calling them Isabella and Alex, names at either end of the spectrum. A study of 1,000 pairs of sisters in the US found that Alex was twice as likely as her twin to take maths or science at a higher level.
If I decided to change my name I'd go with Snotty Wafflefanny according to this website
Comments
Hate to rain on their parade, but maybe "degree of masculinity" varies among parents. It's conceivable that the more masculine parents would give their daughters more masculine names, in the same way that they might be more likely to encourage her to play sports.
Thus, the name would have zero causal status; it would just reflect the greater masculinity of her parents, partially due to the effects of genes, which she would inherit in her turn.
Posted by: Agnostic | April 30, 2007 1:02 PM
You're missing the fact that it's a twin study.
Posted by: Steve Higgins | April 30, 2007 1:15 PM
But even with the same parents, who says they treat the children the same? Noted in the article:
The parents too, in addition to teachers etc., might treat their "Isabella" more like a princess, and "Alex" more like a tomboy. I wonder, though, how much it really is about the name rather than just cultivating different interests in thier different children. Not everyone has to major in math or science, and pushing kids toward it unilaterally is IMO about as bad as steering them away from it.
Posted by: Tara | April 30, 2007 2:24 PM
right... but any effect of that sort would be washed out due to the essentially random assignment of children's names at birth. Unless of course there is some weird interaction of parents planning on calling the first one out some name and there being an effect of birth order in twins ;)
Posted by: steve higgins | April 30, 2007 2:47 PM
I don't know how my own name fits here-- I thought when I was younger that it was masculine (It reminded me of a lady wrestler, but now I'm growing into it.), but many of my friends tell me it's very feminine. I started out as an English major, but now have masters degrees in geology and library and information science. I was a tomboy for sure. My parents (oilfield engineer and nurse) encouraged me to study anything I was interested in. Not a scientific critique, by any means, but don't you women all wonder about your own names?
Posted by: Maxine | April 30, 2007 7:00 PM
The sooner humanity starts using alphanumeric codes for names, the better.
Posted by: A74VUY2 | April 30, 2007 7:13 PM
I always have been puzzled by the feeling that their was a far correlation between the sociocultural appealing of some first-names (Jessica, Cindy, Pamela vs. Marie-Jeanne, Gertrude, Marie-Pierre) and the stereotypical social behaviors. According to the majority/minority model in social psychology (c.f. the work of Lorenzi-Cioldi), a lot of factors are influencing women and men career choices. Women are less likely to choose men-stereotyped careers such as plumber, electrician because they are more on the group thinking side (aggregate) than men who consider themselves more as collection of independent ‘individualities’ (collection). It will not surprise me if the degree of femininity culturally associated to names may influence the career choices which are also influenced by cultural stereotypes and social gender asymmetries.
Posted by: Mirweis Sangin | May 1, 2007 5:09 AM
What I don't understand is how valid it is to say that Grace is a less femme name than Elizabeth. They're both names given exclusively to girls unlike Alex.
Still, interesting study. Another thing to keep in mind is that twins might feel the need to differentiate from each other as an identity formation thing. So the twin in the pair who has the more feminine name becomes "the girlier one". Would that same pressure be there or be as strong if she was not part of a twin?
Posted by: Battlepanda | May 1, 2007 10:48 PM