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Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

verdantlabs.com

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Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#51

Post by toupeetape »

crazygringo wrote: post #46

> Here's a chart with 6 of the names that are the most disproportionately common in 37 professions. It doesn't say they're the top 6, just that they're "6 of" -- and having worked with a lot of similar data sets in the past, the results here feel a little overly edited (i.e. exaggerated, stereotyped) to me. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though.

http://www.verdantlabs.com/blog/2014/05/23/nametrix-2/

There they list the actual top 5 for some professions. Having read that, I am inclined to agree with you here.

The top 6 for car salesmen in that graph has literally only one name (Clay) that is in the actual top 5 and even that was only 5th. The top 4 names (Emmett, Luther, Emanuel, Morton) all got replaced with stereotypical white working class guy names.

The top 6 for surgeon in the graph has no female names yet the actual most disproportionately common name for surgeons is 'Vivienne'.

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#52

Post by V-2 »

learnstats2 wrote: post #11
JohnE008 wrote: post #5

After we tackled gender inequalities, we can move on to name inequalities. How about introducing name-quotas, that ought to fix the problem.

I gather you're being sarcastic, but high name inequality is just another illustration of a lack of social mobility. People of a certain social class are more likely to name their child certain names, and those children are more likely to grow up into particular professions. Name inequality represents clear evidence against the existence of a meritocracy.

> Name inequality represents clear evidence against the existence of a meritocracy.

Meritocracy in what sense?

Coming from wealthier background, you're more likely to be well educated.

While we may dislike that it is so, it doesn't mean there's no meritocracy in the sense that employers don't hire people based on their qualifications alone. Only that they don't care where these qualifications come from.

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#54

Post by munificent »

callum85 wrote: post #39

I don't get why this is presented as a 'chart'. Do the layout and colours mean anything? Or is it just a set of lists laid out in circles for no reason?

The chart is meaningless. Having a colorful image makes links to the post look more appealing in Facebook, G+, Pinterest, etc.

These days, you pretty much have to put a pretty picture in an article if you want traffic from social sites.

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#55

Post by V-2 »

The correlation is obviously indirect, since names are correlated with age, social class, region and other demographics, and these are in turn correlated with career choices.

Once the stats were adjusted for the above, I suppose we'd end up with not much more but noise and some spurious correlations occassionally: http://twentytwowords.com/funny-graphs-show-correlation-betw...

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#57

Post by GoodIntentions »

callum85 wrote: post #39

I don't get why this is presented as a 'chart'. Do the layout and colours mean anything? Or is it just a set of lists laid out in circles for no reason?

As far as this dude, with his aging eyeballs is concerned, the colour's meaning, if any was irrelevant.

I mean, the information was interesting enough to me to try to read it, but I frankly can not parse what looks like #FFFFFF text on #FEFFFE background.

For the love of god, If you want to present data like this, ensure at least a little contrast exists between the text and background

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#58

Post by V-2 »

kornakiewicz wrote: post #20

Some time ago, I saw a paper when some scientists find that people often tends to have place of live and job which is somehow connected with their names eg. there's more Denises who works as dentists or Louises in Louisiane. I also noticed that in my country (Poland) there's quite more people working in IT with names or surnames which begins on K (Polish word for computer is "komputer"), I'm the case.

> I also noticed that in my country (Poland) there's quite more people working in IT with names or surnames which begins on K (Polish word for computer is "komputer")

You don't say... :) Perhaps because names starting with K are simply very common in Poland? ;) 1 in 6 out of 100 most popular last names starts with K.

And quite more IT employees than whom exactly? Presidents of the country? Since 1989 Poland had: Jaruzelski, Walesa, Kwasniewski, Kaczynski and Komorowski... Among prime ministers (since the 90s) about 1 in 5 had either first name or last name that begins with K :)

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#59

Post by saraid216 »

swamp40 wrote: post #31
tarpherder wrote: post #12

Its interesting to see the difference in type of names between Football Coach (Dan, Bill, Mike, Jim, Rich, Steve) and Electrical Engineer (Bernard, Eugene, Edwin, Charles, Alfred, Harvey). Short (one vowel each), common, English versus longer (two vowels each) French/"Posh" English names. Correlation between the names and background/educative level seems likely? Songwriter is interesting too: 4 out of 5 end with a va…

It's also possible that football coaches have a tendency to commonize their names - whether to fit in and make their players more relaxed, or maybe they were just raised in solid blue-collar American families. Their birth certificates could very well read Daniel, William, Michael, James, Richard, Steven. Similarly, the EE's probably have a tendency to be more formal on their resumes or business cards. Their family an…

The data sources are the FEC and SSA (and Wikipedia, for some reason). Which means that this data is coming off the stuff they submitted to the government for whatever reason.
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