Lauren: never met one - didn't know it was a name

Ashley: never met one - sexually ambiguous

Grace: lovely old girl's name

Abigail: old-fashioned, biblical girl's name

Alex: boy's name

Isn't there the risk of confounding "femininity" with fashionability?

bio - Oh good grief, you never saw a movie starring Lauren Bacall? You've missed something - major all time babe.

One of the favourite girl's names here is Apple. How feminine is that?

Perhaps there is some overthinking going on here. I would suggest that "femininity" in this case is a euphemism for silly and and non-serious.

Can you picture a woman named "Misty" taking home the Nobel prize? How about Tammi, Raven, or Dawn? There is a wealth of unserious, stripper-sounding names in play these days. Just as some folks are beginning to study whether made-up "black" names affect life outcomes of their bearers, it seems reasonable to examine a correlations among stripper names, intellectual achievement, and occupational choices.

What's wrong with Dawn?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_Fraser

How feminine is the name Rosie.. like O'Donnel.

> How feminine is the name Rosie.. like O'Donnel.

When I think of 'Rosie', I think of a biceps-flexing "Rosie the Riveter".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ros...sie_the_riveter

S/g, by golly you're right. I stand corrected: never met one, but have lusted after one.

Some time back I had business dealings with a woman named Bambi.* Although she was a highly knowledgeable professional, I couldn't get the idea out of my mind that she was some sort of ditzy airhead, thanks of course to her name.

* = which is a girl's name even though the Disney character was a male deer.

That's funny Peter. The name is certainly very cute but yet I could see how it would make you take someone less seriously.

As for measuring the femininity of names, a while ago I found this site. It searches Google and uses some key phrases to judge the gender of any first name, and gives you a calculated male/female ratio. However, the results need to be taken with a grain of salt. Check the post "algorithms that could use some re-working part 2" on my blog for a discussion.

I found the PDF on the Dangerous Equation mist interesting. Thanks.

The picture of the protesters at Harvard was interesting too. Look at those asian faces :-)

Having read the list on the press release, the ranking does not agree with my associations very much at all. I agree that Abigail and especially Alex don't sound very feminine. However, Lauren and Ashley sound quite feminine, more so than Emma, which is much higher on the list, despite Emma ending with the letter A. The name guesser site I mentioned above agrees with the press release, though.

On the other hand, I have not observed much of a correlation between names and any feature like attractiveness, kindness, tendency to be in science, etc. I have known Elizabeths, Sarahs, and Laurens that were on completely opposite ends of these spectra from their namesakes. You would need a large sample size to test for such effects. If only people put their first names on Hot or Not, I think we would have a study going here.

Figlio wrote a very interesting paper
NAMES, EXPECTATIONS AND THE BLACK-WHITE TEST SCORE GAP
David N. Figlio
Working Paper 11195
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11195
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
March 2005

Figlio said, "Comparing pairs of siblings, I find that teachers tend to treat children differently depending on their names, and that these same patterns apparently translate into large differences in test scores."

I'd like to see a more thorough analysis of this. Elizabeth is a splendid old classical name, popular among royalty. Bambi is no better than Shanikwa.

I did a quick scan of female Nobel Prize laureates in science and medicine. There aren't many, only 12 in total since inception up to 2005 (actually 11 because Marie Curie [actually Maria Sklodowska-Curie] scored twice), none in Physics or Chemistry in the 20 years up to 2005, and only 4 in Physiology/Medicine during that period.

Names in these categories for 1901-2005 are as follows: Marie (aka Maria), Irene, Dorothy, Marie (same one), Maria, Gerty, Rosalyn, Barbara, Rita, Gertrude, Christiane, Linda.

No idea how these things are determined - I guess Gertrude and Gerty might not be considered too 'girlie', but the others don't strike me as notably unfeminine. Safe middle of the road names for the most part.

No Tammi, Bambi, Raven, Jade or Eboni though. I think the correlation is that dumb people have dumb kids and give them dumb names, and the kids end up as 'exotic dancers' due to the lack of intellect required to get a PhD in astrophysics, Mata Hari being a type example of a non-cerebral exotic dancer who got executed for trading sex for secrets that weren't secrets, i.e. she got screwed repeatedly and then shot for the same dumbness. Isn't that double jeopardy?

The selection committee apparently being notably prejudiced against female scientists, other women who perhaps should have got it in these fields and didn't were called:

Lise, Chien-Shiung, Jocelyn, Rosalind and Louise.

Again, not notably unfeminine names, I would have thought.

The fact that two of these five were also Chinese (Chien-Shiung and Louise) might help to explain the 'asian faces' observed among the protesters at Harvard.

I just went onto the Facebook and searched for the names Isabella, Anna, Emma, Jessica, Lauren, Ashley, Grace, and Alex (girls only of course) among Berkeley students. There were no Isabellas, but I got the following data regarding majors:

Anna: (80, 16, 19)=(69.5, 14, 16.5)
Emma: (17, 4, 2)=(74, 17, 9)
Jessica: (136, 28, 32)=(69.5, 14, 16.5)
Lauren: (95, 17, 17)=(74, 13, 13)
Ashley: (74, 14, 8)=(77, 15, 8)
Grace: (42, 14, 17)=(58, 19, 23)
Alex: (9, 2, 2)=(69, 15.5, 15.5)

Here's what they mean: In the ordered triple after each name, the first is the number of people whose major is outside of science (including pre-med), the second is the number majoring in areas like molecular and cell biology or environmental science that are sciences but that seem to attract quite some non-science-type undergrads as well, and the third is the "hard sciences" including all types of engineering and math. If people were double majors, I chose the more "scientific" to classify them. The second ordered triple is just the first one converted to percentages.

As you can see, the findings in the press release are in no way replicated here. The percentages are roughly similar except for Grace, which is much more "scientific" than the others, and curiously the sample of Graces seemed to be about 90% Asian. I wonder if the authors of the study controlled for ethnicity. If not, that's a definite confounding factor, as unpopular names for both sexes seem far more likely to be given to Asians (probably their parents are less aware of naming trends) than others.

If Chinese are anything to go by, they don't actually seem to give a stuff about naming trends for 'English' names, hence the famous real life example of Pubic Ha.

Why any girl would choose to name herself Pubic is beyond me, but she was not an exotic dancer, she was a waitress in a fast food restaurant. Her proudly worn name tag became a bit of a tourist attraction.

I suspect Grace is a popular one just because of its meaning. It is a nice name, fashionable or not.

Has Pubic Ha ever met Randy Dong?

No idea, but if she married him I hope she kept her maiden name, in conformity with traditional practice.

On reflection, I think it more likely that Randy Dong ended up with Ophelia Kok.

OK, we get it with the funny Chinese names. Let's try to stay somewhat on topic.

The topic is funny and stupid. So the comments are funny and stupid too. Who made you comment police? :P

Fair comment, that was kind of tangential and irreverent levity, but back to the point, if indeed there is one - Pubic and Ophelia are both real people. How many women called Ophelia do you know? It illustrates that Asians (or at least Chinese) are not too concerned with naming trends in English speaking countries, they choose names for other reasons. American-born Chinese might depart from that, I don't know.

Relatively, they could be expected to do better on average in sciences and math, just on the grounds of IQ, so without control for ethnicity, that could have a confounding effect, as Arosko suggested.

OK, back to the topic, would it be possible to analyze boy's names and see if there is a correlation between nerd names & nerdiness and hypermasculine names and non-nerdiness?

Of course there's no agreement on what constitutes hypermasculinity in boys names but to me names like Chad and Todd and Kyle are hypermasculine (and dumb); while Alan (Turing) and Warren (Buffett) and Bill (Gates) are nerdy & smart.

OK, back to the topic, would it be possible to analyze boy's names and see if there is a correlation between nerd names & nerdiness and hypermasculine names and non-nerdiness?

I think you'd have the same problem as with girl's names: the really dorky names are rare. And without a twin study, again it could just be that masculine parents bestow masculine names upon their children, after they've bequeathed their masculine genes to their children.

In some English-speaking countries, Chad and Todd and Kyle are the sorts of things you say when something disagreeable sticks to your shoe.

My daughter's name is Nora. Feminine yes? She somehow through no gift of my genes is a top notch math and science wonk.