The Social Security Administration just released the name counts for babies born in 2023. The top names given to babies were Liam for boys and Olivia for girls. Remarkably, boy names Liam and Noah extended their already crushing domination of the top of the chart, while Olivia and Emma declined at the top of the girl chart, so boy names became relatively more concentrated, at least at the top. Here are the top 20:
Top boy names now include Mateo, which saw an 8% increase over 2022, to 11,229 births (not counting the additional 2,503 spelled with two T’s). Not in the top ranked table, but growing very fast: The names with the greatest raw increases were Lainey for girls (+132% to 3,928) and Thiago for boys (+30% to 4,505). Lainey Wilson is a giant country star who broke out in 2021 with a song about how a good man sticks with his woman. Thiago Silva is a soccer champion.
What about Mary?
My interest in names began with Mary, the name given more than 1-in-7 American girls in 1840, and whose dismal showing would shame American Christians if they were really conservative (the old history with numbers back to the Revolutionary War is in my book, Enduring Bonds). The number of new Marys born in 2023 was 2,062, the lowest count ever recorded — just 1-in-848 new girls. At least the Navaeh craze — heaven backwards — which reached a peak of more than twice the number of Marys in the early 2010s, has cooled off. Maybe if Christians were a little more unironically prouder of their heritage they wouldn’t have given us Trump.
Other specific names I’m keeping an eye on: Karen, Alexa, Donald, and Joe all showed no dramatic changes from their very low levels.
Androgyny
Name androgyny is a nichey but growing trend with potential implications for the gender system. Here I update this post from last year.
First, here is the androgyny trend, by two measures (data and code for this section). The first line is the “index of androgyny” proposed by Lieberson et al. who describe it like this: “For the name of every individual girl born in a given year, the boys’ proportion of children with that name. The index gives the average of all these proportions.” The second line is the proportion of babies born each year who get a name that is between 20% and 80% single-sex. This is pretty rare, but has now surpassed 6%.
Those two measures are highly correlated, and the pattern is clear: as of 2022, name androgyny was at a record high in the history of the Social Security Administration data series, having risen a lot in just the last few years. In 2023, however, there was a small decrease in the incidence of androgynous naming.
To look at it a different way, here is the histogram of name gender for two points 50 years apart: 1973 and 2023:
This shows the changes in the tails: the drops at 0% female and 100% female, with much more change on the left end of the distribution, which means change is coming primarily from fewer babies getting all-boy names rather than fewer getting all-girl names.
Finally, if you’re curious about the more truly androgynous names, here are the most common names in 2023 that were between 40% and 60% single-sex. The 20 names on this list account for just 1% of babies born. There is a notable newcomer on the table this year: Drew, which I chart below.
Drew just cracked the androgyny table, thanks to a surge of girls given the name. Well, “surge” is strong for 914 births in 2023, but that’s three-times the number from 2018. Meanwhile, the name has fallen more than 75% for boys since the 1980s. Together, that brought Drew just over 40% female in 2023. Happy to hear your suggestion about this trend. I figure it may have kicked off for boys with Drew Pearson, a Dallas Cowboys star in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then bled over into girls when Drew Barrymore became famous with ET in 1982. I don’t know why it’s up again recently, but the declining boy energy may be providing an opening for parents of girls.
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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License
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