The Democrats have a Fiona problem
The baby-naming shift behind America's political divide
Read this on my blog.
In 2016 a sharp divide emerged in the US in baby naming, and this divide sheds light on why the Democratic Party is failing.
From the 1980s to 2015, androgynous names for girls surged across America. Taylor Swift's mother perfectly captured the reasoning when she explained giving her daughter an androgynous name in 1989: "so she wouldn't be held back if she went into business when she grew up." This was hedge fund manager Andrea Swift applying the logic of her generation: if the world is rigged for boys, give your girl a name that lets her compete.
But analysis of Social Security Administration data shows a sharp divide in 2016. Half the states continued the trend of androgynous names for baby girls: Palmer, Wrenly, Collins were all in the top ten. In the other half of US states, feminine girls' names have surged: Fiona, Miriam, Liana.
Guess which states are going back to gendered names? The blue states.
I’ve been sidetracked many times playing with this interactive map of girl names in the US. And I’m convinced what we're seeing is the gender-equity paradox playing out in real time. This well-documented phenomenon in economics and psychology shows that in places where gender equality is higher, women prefer more distinctly feminine expressions of gender -- including names.
The timing makes sense when you consider that the battle for gender equality at work was won by the early 2000s. Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin's research shows that by the 1990s, women's workforce participation rates in their late twenties were nearly identical to men's. The two-decade delay before we saw that shift reflected in baby names is a textbook case of cultural lag.
So today red states still operate under the assumption that girls need every advantage to succeed in a male-dominated world. But blue states have moved on. The feminine names reflect parents who don’t worry the world will underestimate their daughters - parents operating from confidence that gender equality has been achieved.
Ironically, the Democratic Party continues to beat the drum about women needing advancement and wonder why no one is listening. While Republicans who want to restore traditional power structures are giving their daughters the exact tools needed to navigate the old boys club.
This is political realignment in action — not through policy positions, but through the fundamental assumptions about what kind of world we're living in and what kind of world our children will inherit.
The parents choosing names for their daughters right now are making decisions based on the world they think their children will face, not the world their own mothers navigated. And those assumptions about the future tell us more about American politics than any poll or policy platform.
Hey Penelope,
I read somewhere else on your blog that this post flopped and you were disappointed. I'm a name nerd, and everything related to names fascinates me— this analysis is so interesting and insightful. So here's my little positive reinforcement.
My daughter's name is Alana—pretty uncommon in Spain. I thought I was escaping all the trends—but I was unknowingly jumping on the "names starting with A" trend.
Then I named my boy Atlas—even less common in Spain, though it's climbing the charts in the U.S. Not long after he was born, I read this article called "From Atlas to Luna: how the pandemic has changed baby names." Apparently, there's been a trend for nature-based names after COVID.
I find it endlessly fascinating how baby naming operates at such a subsconscious level while appearing almost rational—and how we then shape our subliminal decisions into narratives that make sense. This applies to so many other decisions in life, but baby naming is probably the most elegant example.
So please, keep writing about baby names!
Maybe. I'm not convinced.