Name your child for success!

Shakespeare famously posed the question:

"What's in a name?"

The answer may actually be: quite a bit!

Your given name (and your family name, for that matter) likely contains a lot of subtle information about you and your history. For example, we often assume names correlate with gender (as I have in previous articles)... Except the gender identity of some common names has changed over history (examples here)! Your name may also correlate with your political affiliation or what job you have.

I recently wondered: do certain names correlate with brilliance or high intellectual achievement? 

To find out, I gathered a large dataset of full names from people with PhDs in science (from the IAU and AAAS), as well as the names of lawyers using several recent years of bar exam "pass lists" provided by WA, NY, and TX. In total I was able to easily (read: quickly) gather over 36,000 full names of scientists and lawyers!

With this corpus of highly educated names in hand, let's look at which are most common!

The most common names of scientists:

Right away you can see a dramatic trend: it's mostly dudes. In fact, of the top 100 most common names for scientists, only 14 are female!

The most common names of lawyers:

While mens names still dominate, there are definitely more women in top list. For comparison, of the top 100 most common names for lawyers, 50 are female! That difference is shocking to me.

Gender of White House Visitors

Last summer, as as part of my internship working with these awesome people at MSR,  I spent a lot of time playing with public data sources. One fascinating dataset that I chose as a benchmark (for what is currently known as Tempe at MSR) is the White House Visitor records, which (as of last July) had over 3 Million records of visitors to the White House during the Obama administration.

This dataset has been in the news before, and is (in my opinion) a great example of public disclosure that we should be pushing for in government. A whole other conversation of course is how/when such records should be released, and by whom. The White House Visitor dataset is also known to be incomplete, censoring records for national or personal security reasons, and maybe other reasons too.

Here is just one question I came up with: Do more men or women visit the White House? My guess was that a majority of visitors would be men.

Boys Named Sue

I came across a graph I made last summer while at Microsoft Research, and thought I would share it on the blog. The data comes from the very cool baby name database provided by the US Social Security administration. In the past year a lot of people have picked up on this dataset for various fun purposes. I have repeatedly used it as a simple source to assign probable genders based on given names (e.g. in my ongoing Gender in Astro Talks study).

Some fun facts about the dataset:

• For every year the dataset includes the # of males and females born with every given (first) name. 
• Only names with at least 5 people of a given gender are included to help preserve anonymity. 
• There are 1758730 entries, spanning back to 1880, with 91320 unique names
• There are 28074 male-only names
• There are 53305 female-only names

I love me some Johnny Cash (and Shel Silverstein) and thought it would be interesting to see how frequently people named "Sue" happen to be boys. The total answer is 0.4% of all Sue's are male. Here is the chart showing number of boys named sue over time:

As a reddit user pointed out, there are many more boys named Susan than Sue. But if Shel had written the song using that name, it would have taken on a different meaning...

"My name's Susan, how YOU doin?"