You may remember those stories from a few years back about how there were more men called John running big companies than there were women. At the Financial Times, we had our own version: at one point in the economics and public policy zone of our office, there were more Sarahs than there were men.
But while such comparisons are intended to highlight gender diversity (or the lack of it) they raise another question too: why do some names become so popular at certain moments in time?
First names are of great interest to academics because they are, as one research paper puts it, “essentially unconstrained individual choices, shorn of commercial interest”. This makes them a remarkable source of data about how culture and taste change over time.
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