Study: Girly name could inhibit your child

By ALANAH MAY ERIKSEN
What's in a name?

Nothing if you ask Rotorua twins Lisa and Arna Macfarlane.

The pair may have girly names but that doesn't mean they didn't tackle the "hard" subjects at school. They've rubbished a study that found girls with feminine names like Anna, Elizabeth or Emma, are less likely to study maths or physics after they turn 16. They are traditionally seen as male subjects and are more popular among girls named Abigail, Lauren and Ashley - which have been judged as less feminine names.

The consequences of the name you give your child are so strong that parents can set their twin daughters off on completely different career paths, according to the study.

But the Macfarlane sisters, whose names are considered feminine, are seemingly bucking the trend. They both work at Rotorua's Waiariki Institute of Technology. Lisa is an executive assistant and while she admits her sister is better at maths, she also took it at school, along with physics, and passed both with flying colours. Arna is a debt officer, which involves accountancy work.

"I love it. I love numbers and everything about them."

The new study found children given "lower status" names or names spelt in an unusual way, do 3 to 5 per cent worse in exams on average than those with more traditional names.

Arna's children are Frederick, Antonia and Rhoda-Jayne. She said despite Rhoda-Jayne's name being a little unusual, the 7-year-old was doing well at school.



Author of the new study, David Figlio, professor of economics at the University of Florida, calculated a linguistic femininity score for each name he studied by using 1700 letter-and-sound combinations that could be associated as either female or male.

Alexandra Barratt, professor of English language history at Waikato University said one reason girls with unusual names did not do as well could be because teachers had lower expectations and they were therefore less likely to try as hard.