So what caused that very short spike in "Jaime" as a girls name? Looks like it might have occurred right around 1960.
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The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
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Re: The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
#72Somehow 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.
Re: The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
#73What'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?
Re: The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
#74Re: The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
#75Re: The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
#76At 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…
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).
Re: The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
#77First, 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 wom…
> 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 masculinit…
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.
Re: The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
#78The 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.
Re: The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
#79At 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…
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.
Re: The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
#80I 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…
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.