A Boys Name or a Girl’s Name? Ask BigQuery!

Simple Questions Often Have Complex Answers

I’ve been spending time lately playing with the Public Datasets on BigQuery. I’m writing about those experiences while I experiment, because — why not? This article is part of that series.

The framing of a question — or its answer — can lead to dramatically different results. I’m passionate about “open data” because it allows more people to analyze a given question — and to see how any answer was derived.

Let’s say you wanted to answer a simple question: “Is that a girl’s name or a boys name?”

There’s a lot of names that are used for both baby boys and girls. The five most popular (featuring at least 10,000 boys and girls), with the least difference are Kerry, Riley, Kris, Elisha, and Robbie — with less than 5% more babies of one.

Is Kerry a Typically a Girl’s Name or a Boy’s Name?

Want to check other names? Skip to the end of this article for the BigQuery SQL statements you can use to see for yourself.

Ask anyone younger than 50 they’ll probably say it’s a girls name.

Simple questions can have complicated answers, so I love the data density provided by a good visualization. That means the best answer I can offer is this infographic.

There’s almost the same number of boys and girls named Kerry — slightly more boys in fact. It was a popular name from the 50’s to the 70’s, but it’s now a pretty uncommon name for baby’s of either gender. It started as a boy’s name in the South, but has always been more of a girl’s name in the North.

Showing My Working

We have access to all boy and girl names for babies born in the US since 1900, so a quick query shows us that up-until now — with 97,958 total Kerrys — there are slightly more boys (51% vs 49%). For 2015, 70% of all Kerry’s born were boys.

That might indicate a trend — perhaps Kerry is becoming more of a boy’s name? Another simple query and it turns out, not so much:

Those twin peaks are surprising. Let’s take a look at the regional breakdown in 1960 and 1971:

In the North East it’s always been a girl’s name — in the South it started, and largely stayed, a boy’s name. Putting everything together, you get this animation showing the change from boy’s name to girl’s name from 1960 to 1971.

I chose Kerry because it’s the most popular, most gender-ambiguous name — with nearly 98,000 babies born and only a 1% difference in the number of boys and girls.

The most popular girl’s name (and overall name) that has at least 10,000 boy babies is Jessie with 276,000 babies (with 20% more girls than boys.)

The most popular boy’s name with at least 10,000 girl babies is Casey, with 184,000 babies featuring 18% more boys than girls.