Came across this fascinating graphic showing first names more common than expected in certain professions, from 2014.
I can’t vouch for its accuracy. But it sometimes rings true. Augustus seems a good name for a judge. Football coaches and meteorologists lean towards single syllable names. But what names may be more common in librarians, race car drivers or electrical engineers? Fitness instructors or car sales folk? What do you think about these odd predilections?
To the extent it’s reflecting a real phenomenon, it’s almost certainly cultural. Many of these professions tend to be hereditary in a sense. Ranchers, Football Players, and Rabbi’s are generally coming from ranching, sports fan, or Hebrew families…so it makes sense that certain names would be more popular in those cultures.
It appears that they are using campaign contribution data and there is no mention of their methodology, so we don’t know if they deduped people who donated to multiple campaigns, nor if those who donate are a representative sample of all members of their profession.
Kim, for instance, is listed under Police Officer in their chart. According to my data (all adult consumers in the US), Kim is over 100 times more likely to be a doctor than a police officer. In fact, police officer is the 122nd most popular profession for the Kim gang.
I think they might have looked at it the other way, starting with the profession and not the name. After all, how many people do you know named Augustus from this millennium who don’t gorge and guzzle chocolate?
Still, if you want your son to be a surgeon consider names like Jefferson, I guess. In Canada this seems a very rare name.
I still think they are dealing with duplicates and the fact that political donors are not a representative sample. In an actual consumer database, the top 20 most common “occupations” for a person named Augustus are:
The 20 most common names of people whose occupation is “Legal/Attorney/Lawyer”:
Augustus shows up at position 1121.
But you have to compare to the prevalence in the general population. Of course “John” is the most common name for attorneys-- It’s the most common name in most professions (at least, the ones that aren’t female-dominated). The fact that John is common for attorneys doesn’t tell you anything. If “Augustus” is the thousandth most common name for attorneys, though, but the five thousandth most common name in the general public, then that tells you something.
I found their blog post where they speak to the methodology, so for grins I’m going to try to duplicate it. For a given name, they break down what percentage of people with that name are in each occupation. So 2% of people named Augustus might be a lawyer, while only 1.4% of Sallys are. There are some flaws with that logic in the case of very uncommon names. If a name only shows twice, then it will be 50% of an occupation and probably win out. For instance in my data, 11 people are named (rare name here) and show an occupation. 1 of them is president, so 9% of (rare name here) are presidents. I’m going to limit the output to first names for which I have at least 100 records with occupation to combat this issue and I might move that number to 1000 if I still see skewed results. For reference, even filtering for 1000 with occupations, Augustus is still around. (very rare name here) is not.
They do appear to be limited by the fact that it’s political contributor data as my names don’t match at all, but I do think their idea is pretty cool. If I allow names that show up at least 100 times with an occupation, I get this top 10 for Legal/Attorney/Lawyer:
Over 4.5% of people named Shepard (note the uncommon spelling) are in that occupation group.
When I only allow names that show up 1000 or more times, we get a completely different list:
In that group, about 2% of Seymours fall into this category. Even with that filter in place, Augustus is way down at 59th position, with around 0.8% of them being a bit lawyerly, so I guess we need to get more Seymours and Bertrams to donate to political candidates.
Lots of strippers named Crystal.