The Rise of Gender-Neutral Names Isn’t What It Seems
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Baby names just aren’t what they used to be. You can see it these days in all the little Blakes and Emersons and Phoenixes and Robins—and if you can’t immediately tell whether I’m talking about boy or girl names, then ah, yes, that’s exactly it. When it comes to baby naming, we’re at peak androgyny.
The rise of gender-neutral names has been particularly notable, a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park. In 2021, 6 percent of American babies were bestowed androgynous names, approximately five times the number in the 1880s. This is a small minority of babies born every year—obviously boy names such as Liam and obviously girl names such as Olivia still —but “anything that has changed by a factor of five in our culture is a big deal,” says Laura Wattenberg, the author of . The jump is big enough to make you wonder what’s going on: Could it be, as some headlines have proclaimed, that baby-name trends ?
