Does your name influence your career choices?

Logically, you would think names do not influence career choices, although there’s a long tradition of actors and writers choosing different public names to their given birth names.

However, a new study on 1,000 twin sisters highlighted in Omnibrain reports the more feminine your name appears to be, the less likely you are to study maths or physics after the age of 16. So Anna or Elizabeth, assessed in the study as being more feminine sounding than Lauren and Ashley, are less likely to study maths or physics than their twin sister. So they are less likely to work in science or maths careers.

Trying to find out why this could be so, is more difficult. Defining cause and effect is much more difficult for the psychologists than it is for the natural scientists. Human beings are impacted by so many influences.

Is Elizabeth less likely to study maths because teachers do not expect her to, demonstrating the impact of influences outside the family home?
Or do parents treat the child with the more feminine name differently to her twin sister?

Either way the study demonstrates the impact of names.

More pressure on parents to choose the right name and maybe I need to think about a new career name!


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