Most gender neutral given name in Western culture

In My Humble Opinion
1

We’ve skirted this topic several times, but I want to ask it in a slightly different way — What would you consider the one most gender neutral given name in Western culture? Let’s ignore the issue of spelling variations for this purpose.

Here are some that come to mind —

Adrian, Alex, Andy, Aubrey, Billy, Blair, Bobby, Cameron, Casey, Charlie, Dale, Dana, Frankie, Gay, Georgie, Hayden, Jessie, Jody, Jordan, Lee, Lou, Madison, Michel, Morgan, Nicky, Jamie, Pat, Randy, Rory, Sam, Sidney, Terry, Tony, Whitney

These are names that were once gender neutral but have probably crossed over to “likely feminine” —

Alexis, Ashley, Ashlyn, Avery, Beverly, Carol, Christie, Courtney, Darcy, Evelyn, Francis, Ginger, Hilary, Jackie, Jill, Jocelyn, Joyce, Julie, Kelly, Kim, Lauren, Laurie, Leslie, Lindsay, Lynn, Marion, Meredith, Patsy, Robin, Sal, Sasha, Shannon, Sharon, Shelly, Shirley, Stacy, Tory, Tracy, Valery, Vivian

2

I don’t think any of those are completely gender neutral. Going through all of them, I’d lean to one gender or another. (For example, if someone was talking about a person named alex, I’d assume they were male, though I wouldn’t be surprised if otherwise.)

I think ‘Joe’ is rather unisex. When I hear it, I don’t make an assumption.

3

A lot of these are often spelled differently for men and women. For instance, “Bobby” is probably male, but “Bobbie” is probably female. And it’s probably a nickname, anyway, for “Robert” or “Roberta”.

On the other hand, I don’t see “Drew” on the list, and I’d consider “Robin” to be more in the first list than in the second.

4

In the US, maybe those are gender neutral, but in the UK, at least half of those are almost unambiguously one gender or the other (or barely used at all- eg, Randy).
Sam is the only one of that list where I know several of each gender- but it’s a nickname, not their full given name. I guess I’ve met a few Pats of each too, but again, it’s not a full given name- they’re generally Patricks or Patricias.

Here, ‘Joe’ is male, ‘Jo’ is female.

5

I think the answer here is not going to be a classic name, but rather one of the many newish “first name as last name” deals. I have a friend named Parker, and it’s fifty fifty whether people think Parker is male or female. Riley is another good one.

6

Sue.

7

Diminutive names for the most part, but Chris, Jamie and Pat.

8

Hah, the OP forgot “Kelly”.

9

Nope.

10

I think Parker is a Golden Retriever and Riley is a Chocolate Lab, but I can’t tell their sex, either.

11

I think of Dana as the most unisex name on the list. In my experience, at least, I’ve known several Danas, all of whom spelled the name the same, who were mixed about 50-50 with respect to gender.

I was also surprised at how many names were previously unisex that I think of as purely female names - Meredith and Evelyn especially.

12

Here’s a cool website for seeing name popularity by gender over time:

http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager

For example, I always thought of the name “Kendall” as a rare name for a guy (the only Kendall I could readily name was the NBA player Kendall Gill), but since about 7 or 8 years ago (after naming a boy child Kendall) I’ve found that many people, even most people, think of it as a girl’s name. Entering the name “Kendall” in the above website shows that there were no girls named Kendall until around the early 1970s; that it remained a rarer (if increasingly more common) girl’s name than a boy’s name around 1990, when it surged dramatically as a girl’s name with a corresponding drop in popularity as a boy’s name. It’s now about 5:1 or 6:1 more common as a (baby) girl’s name.

Futher detective work on my part shows this may or may not have been related to the introduction of a popular character “Kendall Hart” on the soap opera All My Children in 1993 (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar).

In general, it seems “last names as first names” are becoming very popular for girls, with the resulting effect of being “only” a girls name once it gets past the point of being weird. I know of quite a few under-20 females named something like Mackenzie, Madison or Kennedy.

It’s often been observed that once a name “goes girl” it never regains popularity as a boy’s name, but it is possible for the tide to turn before reaching that tipping point. Case in point: I remember thinking it was odd back in the mid-1980s that someone named their two young daughters “Drew” and “Devon”, both of which I definitely thought of as boys’ names when I first heard them. A quick check on that webpage shows that Devon peaked in popularity as a girl’s name in the mid-1980s, never became popular (no soap opera characters got named Devon ;)) and has since dropped off the radar. Same thing for “Drew”.

Now that I think of it, it’s possible they spelled Devon’s name as “Devyn”, which has remained on the radar as a girl’s name, fighting neck and neck with its use as a boy’s name with the cutesy-Y alternate spelling.

13

My list is just examples of names that come to my mind as being gender neutral. You don’t have to address them. Just propose your own.

Ah, that’s a good one.

My OP specifically noted that spelling should be disregarded. Spelling of names is currently in flux, and I’m more interested in what you might think upon first hearing a name, without knowing how it’s spelled.

I’m not making distinctions between proper names and nicknames for this purpose. Just think of a name as you might hear it for the first time, without knowing whether it’s a nickname. It’s pretty common these days for names that are traditionally nicknames to be given as legal names or at least used as such.

Ah, that’s an interesting one. Of course, now that you mention it, Drew Barrymore comes to mind immediately. But this didn’t strike me as otherwise ambiguous.

The list is really from my own perceptions. You need not accept any of them. Just move on to what names you do consider gender neutral.

14

Playing around with the Names data from the 1990 census, (a great resource for popular US surnames and given names,) I found three name spellings that were exactly the same popularity for males and females, down to a thousandth of a percent accuracy:

Kris - 0.011% frequency for both males and females
Ariel - 0.007% for both males and females
Hong - 0.004% for both males and females

Kris and Hong seem about right to me. Ariel is a surprise; I think of that as a girl’s name.

This data is by its nature spelling-specific. Still an interesting exercise

15

Of the names given in the OP, the one that strikes me as most gender-neutral is “Casey”. I consider the name “Carey” to be even more so. I think the ‘answer’ varies from person to person depending on who, and what names, you’ve encountered in your life.

16

First thing I thought of was Chris

Could be a shortened form of Christopher, or might be feminized somewhat with an odd spelling (Kriss), but when simply heard and not seen spelled, I have no way of knowing gender on this name.

Regards, Topher

17

Vyvyan will always remind me of the Young Ones.
Regards, Rik

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18

"First thing I thought of was Chris

Could be a shortened form of Christopher, or might be feminized somewhat with an odd spelling"

Or it could be short for Christine without an odd spelling. “when simply heard and not seen spelled, I have no way of knowing gender” So you are saying you can tell gender when you read the name Chris Hankins?

To the OP re not having to address your choices: Since you provide a list of names as exemplars of gender neutral names, when several disagree that your choices ‘show others the way’ it is indeed appropriate to comment on their failing to fit the bill.

19

Back to the OP’s question of what a clearly gender neutral (English) name is in Western culture, one can perhaps use that graphing tool to gauge how balanced its use is as a girl’s or a boy’s name. Just remember that it’s graphing names given to babies born in that year in the US, so it takes a while for a spike in use to get reflected in the general population, and does not reflect different trends in Canada, the UK, Ireland, etc.

I would say using a diminuitive like “Pat”, “Alex” or “Chris” is out of bounds for this discussion, as one of the reasons those unisex versions are popular in the first place (from my experience) is exactly to disguise one’s gender, as usually its use by a woman is a truncation of a longer, female-only name (Patricia, Alexa/Alexandra, Christine/Christina).

One name that came to my mind was “Casey”. I’ve heard people calling their daughters “Casey” a few times over the past decade, but I would always have thought of it as a boy’s name due to the famous poem about the Mudville Nine, Casey At The Bat. (And of course, Casey was the last name of the person in the poem.)

That “Name Voyager” tool I linked to earlier shows that “Casey” reached near equilibrium in its gender split for babies born in the late 1970s, but then dropped off, leaving it predominantly a boy’s name… But the war isn’t over, since its use as a boy’s name has declined faster than its use as a girl’s name. It’s presently about 2:1 in favor of its use as a boy’s name.

“Dana” is a lost battle, Dana Carvey notwithstanding. Any Dana born in the US after 1940 is overwhelmingly likely to be a female.

20

Jamie is the one that stands out the most for me. It’s the name that Malcolm in the Middle used when they wanted their new baby to have an ambiguous gender.