Robin

[koganbot]

Have a theory that once a name becomes unisex it's only a matter of time before it goes all-female, parents shunning the name for their boy children. "Leslie" is a clear example.

But "Robin" has been unisex for at least 100 years, and doesn't seem to be shifting; at least that's my impression, though the baby-name sites tend to list it only as a girl's name, and as a girl's name its popularity has been plummeting since the '60s. BUT: when I type the name into Google, Google suggests the following in order of popularity: Robin Williams (male), Robin Thicke (male), Robin Hood (male), Robin Meade (female), Robin Trower (male), Robin Wright Penn (female), Robin Givens (female), Robins Federal Credit Union (n/a), Robin Tunney (female), Robin Söderling (male). So it's clearly still a viable male name, unless its viability has ended too recently for me to notice.

EDIT: Here's graphic info for the popularity of Robin as a boy's and girl's over time. It's been more popular as a girl's name than a boy's, but the rise and decline in both seems proportional (boy's name peaking slightly earlier, which means parents of boys fled the name slightly earlier than parents of girls). Here's the same info for Leslie, and the difference is drastic, going from almost all male in the 1920s to almost all female in the 1950s. And for the hell of it, here's the info for Jordan, which went from all male in the early '70s to one-quarter female in the mid '80s, and it's been holding proportional ever since then (which challenges my theory; maybe things are changing). I've got more info in the comments.

Comments

[ms-bracken.livejournal.com]

Robin shortens to Rob, which is a short version of an unambivalently male name - which might be a factor in its survival as a male name.

[koganbot]

Here's Carey, which goes from all boys to two-thirds girls, with boys peaking earlier than girls, but then holds proportionately from there as the name plummets.

But here's one that counters my hypothesis: Adri, which gets us Adrian and Adrienne and Adriana and Adrianna etc. and which shows Adrian starting as exclusively male, no female form in sight, the going into a slight decline in the '30s and '40s as the female homophone Adrienne overtakes it, then it rises proportionately with Adrienne to the early '60s, then shoots up from the '70s to the present, while Adrienne gives way to the more feminine-sounding "Adriana" and "Adrianna" - which means that it's the parents of girls who've been fleeing the AY-DREE-UN sound for a more feminine form.

Taylor starts all male and stays that way for at least a century, then between the early '70s and early '90s it jumps rapidly to three-quarters female, then stays proportional as it declines, but now seems to be picking up again female but not male.

There's a site that talks about unisex names but seems more interested in whether the names are truly balanced than whether they're holding steady proportionately, whereas the latter is more my concern to test my hypothesis (that once a name goes somewhat unisex it's only a matter of time before it's all female; a hypothesis that doesn't seem to be holding up). The site says that the number of unisex names are declining overall since 1995, but its definition of unisex (both male and female in the top 1,000) doesn't seem all that useful. Maybe someone who knows what he or she is doing statistically can get on the case. But the site does further damage to my hypothesis by saying that, while "Campbell, Guadalupe, Kennedy, Shannon, and Shea are now all primarily female names,... Drew, Ashton, Devon, and Devin have become solidly male." Which means that names can travel either way, rather than just towards female.

I was expecting Courtney to be one of the top unisexers, but apparently it no longer ranks. It started rare but male, then in the early '50s it became rapidly female but also got more popular as a male name, peaking earlier male than female (as my hypothesis would predict) and now female-only but back down to its 1960s levels. So that supports my hypothesis, but as I said there seem to be enough counter-examples to batter it. My guess is if someone did the analysis it would show a tilt more towards male fleeing female than vice versa, but nowhere near as strong a phenomenon as I would have thought. Of course, the phenomenon might be different in different decades.

[koganbot]

Ashley (and variants) was rare but all male, e.g., the Leslie(!) Howard character in Gone With The Wind, until the 1950s when it quickly became predominantly female and started to rise, though its male usage rose a bit as well, actually peaking a little bit later in the '80s than the female usage, though the male usage got snuffed out in the '90s while the female is still top twenty. Fwiw, the spelling Ashlee peaks in the early '80s, drops through about 2003, then briefly picks up through 2005, then resumes its decline (though I think the pickup is already beginning prior to summer 2004; hard to read the graph exactly). Ashley (by far the more common spelling) briefly slows its decline in 2003 through 2005 but never reverses it. (Also, obviously, notice recent uptick in Taylor.)

Marion as a boy's name never did all that much and seems to peak in 1910, and gets snuffed out altogether by the early '90s. Combined Marions, Marians, and Marianns as girl's names clobber it and peak a little later, as I'd expect, but interestingly, though they're all in decline, as is Marianne, the more feminine Mariana/Marianna showed strength in the early '00s.

[koganbot]

OK, from the Baby Names Garden 2005 report on unisex baby names:

What did change between 1995 and 2005 were the names themselves. Of the 77 unisex names in 1995, fully 50% (38 names) lost their unisex identity by 2005. Discounting those situations where both names fell out of favor, the name more often moved to the male side of the table rather than the female, contrary to conventional wisdom about unisex names.

Some notable names that shook off their female challengers by 2005 include Alex, Adrian, Blake, and Carson. The female popularity ranking for those four names dropped out of the Top 1000 by 2005. On the flip side, the unisex names Dana, Erin, Leslie, and Madison muscled their male counterparts out of the Top 1000 over the same period.

By 2005, 23 new names joined the old guard of unisex names. Two names previously popular as single gender names that are now seeing growth as a unisex name are Dylan and Hayden.

What to make of these numbers? Certain names seem to be stubbornly unisex, with neither side admitting defeat and slinking away. Most of America’s Top Ten Unisex Baby Names fall into this category. But, as people have noted before, over time there is a tendency for most unisex names to end up female. Of the names that were unisex in both 1995 and 2005, and where a trend is clear, 13 are trending to the female side, while just 8 are trending to the male side. But on the contrary, names from 1995 that lost their unisex appeal tended to become more male!

The trouble I have with this analysis is that their criterion for unisex - "both names in the Top 1,000" - doesn't give us the information we need. That is, if a name that's mostly female gets enough male use to get the male into the top 1,000, but then the male drops down again, this isn't remotely the same, or as interesting, as a name that was once predominantly female or mostly equal now becoming predominantly male, or vice versa. If both the male use and the female use is declining, and one drops out of the top 1,000 first, that's useless information. And I don't know for sure what they mean in their chart where they say things like "trends male" or "trends female," since they never say anything like "predominantly female but rise in male" or "predominantly male but rise in female"; so I don't know if e.g. "trends male" just means "more male than female" or "the ratio of male to female is rising over time." Seems to be the former, in which case "trend" is very much the wrong word. In their write-up they say "Two names previously popular as single gender names that are now seeing growth as a unisex name are Dylan and Hayden," but in their chart they say that Dylan has a "strong trend to male." So, they don't know how to communicate with precision; how to communicate a lot of information quickly, clearly, and accurately; and what to communicate. That said, the info they've got is fascinating, and if we want to we can check their names back at Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager site. Laura Wattenberg at Baby Name Wizard says in a blogpost that the trend towards female is no longer clear, but she doesn't give any statistics. Probably if I searched enough I'd find a site that did the statistical analyses rather than just eyeballing it. I hope so, anyway.

[koganbot]

So anyway, checking "Dylan" over at NameVoyager, it's all male until the early '90s, when it becomes merely predominantly male but the girls' use is rising rapidly, though still relatively small. It peaks for boys in 2003 and peaks for girls in 2004 and then declines but then, for girls only, picks up again in 2006. Now eyeballing the various graphs, the way it looks to me is that through 2003 the name is overwhelmingly male but proportionately the female use is on the rise, then starting 2003-2004 there's an overall falloff of each, about proportional, but then in 2005 though 2008, while the name remains overwhelmingly male, and declines somewhat but remains popular, the proportion of females in comparison to males rises, though it's still a small proportion. So "strong trend to male" in the Baby Names Garden 2005 chart tells the wrong story - the name has been strongly male, but once it starts becoming a girl's name the trend has been to increase the proportion of girls, though not in a huge way. I'd say that in 2005 the name had hit a point where it wasn't trending either way, and the fact that it's so nonfemale now makes its renewed rise in females in the last few years too small to really be a big deal (though maybe a statistician could tell me otherwise), but "strong trend to male" isn't giving me the right information.

[koganbot]

OK, and now checking Ryan(n), it's in much the same situation as Dylan: overwhelmingly male, with an overall falloff in use (though still used plenty), but girls peaking later and becoming a stronger proportion; this probably won't mean much as the name falls further, but the decline reversed itself once for girls and might again.

Something else I notice: at its male peak in the '70s Ryan was 14th at about 7,000 per million babies. In 2003 it was 14th at about 3,800 per million babies. In other words, the top names are no longer nearly as top as they were thirty years ago.

All right, "Frances/Francis": At its peak around 1910 it was about 2:1 female, with most but not all the girls spelled with the "es" and most but not all boys spelled "is," more girls than boys crossing the spelling line. As it declined significantly over the century, the spelling became even more stratified and by 1970 none of the spelling was crossing over, but as the name declined the genders tended to equal up, with only a slight edge to the girls. So this name has been solidly unisex and never has lost it, perhaps helped by the spelling difference. (Spelling difference didn't prevent "Leslie/Lesley" from going all female, but this is possibly because "Lesley" has been much rarer than "Leslie," and was adopted by females rather late, and it never really caught on with them in comparison to "Leslie.")

[koganbot]

One more thought: Angel started rare and male about 1900, rose steadily, picked up the pace a little in the '40s, with a few girls starting to get the name too, then in the '60s the girls overtook the boys. Then, however, that reversed itself and girls declined while boys rose, boys catching the girls in the '80s, and rising to overwhelming dominance after that as the male name became more and more common, though the numbers rose for girls too, just not nearly as much. The ratio is now about 5:1. But what I think is happening here isn't so much a change in naming preferences since the '60s but rather that for Hispanics "Angel" is a popular male name but for Anglos it is female but relatively uncommon.

Also I wonder about the trends in names for which there are male and female variants that sound different - Angel and Angelo versus Angel and Angela and Angelina and Angelica and Angelique and Angeline and Angelia, for instance, with a lot of immigration effects (to my surprise, though Angelo dropped in half during the '30s, it has held steady since then. Compare to names like Taylor and Avery and Jordan* and Cameron where there are no significant variants.

To my surprise, Michael was a viable though not very common girl's name from the '30s to the '80s, rising along the way and then falling off a cliff, giving way to the previously rare Michaela. Lee is one with a similar pattern to Michael's, relatively rare (though a bit more common as a girl's name than Michael was), and nowhere near the male use, and Lee had more fluctuations than usual. But the girl's use fell off a cliff in the '70s and '80s, while the male use is still hanging on, though pretty low.

A shortcoming of the site is that it doesn't take account of double names that function as first names rather than first and middle: Mary Frances, Sally Mae, and such. I'm not sure it could, actually, since how do you know?

Aaliyah versus Alice in 2008; about 900 versus 200.

*Or is Ava a variant on Avery? Jordana is a variant on Jordan but to my surprise (given that I know a Jordana) it's never broken the top 1,000.

[koganbot]

From McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, October 28, 2009:

Reports are running rampant that country star Taylor Swift, 19, and "New Moon" heartthrob Taylor Lautner, 17, are dating.

A fast seamstress?

[(Anonymous)]

Frank, Taylor Swift appeared on the 10/29/09 "Ellen" show, and there was a segment where they set out to collaborate on writing a song. It may be worth it to you to check out one of the video postings on YouTube. She also discussed the Taylor/Taylor situation.

AK

TS SNL 11/07

[(Anonymous)]

Also, Taylor Swift will be host and musical performer on "Saturday Night Live" on 11/07/09. If I recall correctly, you don't have a TV, but you could probably find it through Hulu online.

AK