
Do Masculine Names Help Female Lawyers Become Judges? Evidence from S. Carolina - mxfh
http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/coffey-mclaughlin_masculine-names-aler-2009.pdf
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DavidWoof
Fun with small data sets. As far as I can tell, fully 1/3 of the difference
they describe is due to a single female judge with the unlikely name of
"Bruce". This line is my favorite:

> Moreover, changing a girl’s name from “Sue” to “Bruce” (99% of those named
> “Bruce” in South Carolina’s voting population are males) increases her
> probability of becoming a judge by a factor of 5 (roughly).

Right. And changing a boy's middle name to Hussein no doubt increases his
changes of reaching the White House by a factor of 1000.

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lurker14
Changing a boy's name to Sue, however, is known to lead to very positive
outcomes. There was even a poem/song written about it.

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jivatmanx
Like a good trolling, link bait has have a slight semblance of plausibility to
work effectively.

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jboggan
Funniest footnote I've ever read in a paper:

"8. At the request of an anonymous referee, we perform a check on our nominal
masculinity measure by examining the score for Bacon Magazine’s “Top 10
Stripper Names.” In theory, female exotic dancers choose hyper-feminized stage
names. Only two of those names, Candy and Porsche, had a nominal masculinity
of 0. Three other names had nominal masculinity names below the mean female
voter. Two other names on the list actually scored quite high in nominal
masculinity; Angel had a nominal masculinity of 0.15 (due to its popularity
among Spanish speakers as a boy’s name) and Houston had a nominal masculinity
of 0.98. These ﬁndings suggest the potential for further research, which is
beyond the scope of this paper."

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ollysb
Do more masculine names help male lawyers become judges?

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dmix
Oh good question.

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DannyBee
Do studies with very small to small sample sizes end up with strange results?

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bhickey
Yes, 100% of studies (n = 1) agree.

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wyager
"Masculinity" is defined as "number of men who have this name per number of
people who have this name." Seems to me like A)it's difficult to do this test
accuracy given the small number of people who have a given name and B)it
doesn't necessarily accurately reflect how we perceive the masculinity of a
name.

Also, "Because the number of female judges in the data is small, the
asymptotic justification for conducting standard hypothesis tests is suspect."

This is an interesting paper, but it seems like it would benefit from a larger
dataset.

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biot
This has inspired me: if I have a daughter, I'm going to name her Diesel.

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keefe
in related news, stripes on the side of cars make them drive faster (in south
carolina)

