May 2, 2011

Could your name predict your profession?

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A new LinkedIn study says yes.

[Photo by Swift Benjamin]

LinkedIn data analysts evaluated more than 100 million profiles on the business networking site to suss out the most common CEO names.

The top name for women CEOs? Deborah. And for their male counterparts? Peter.

Here are the female runners-up: Sally, Debra, Cynthia, and Carolyn. And here are the males: Bob, Jack, Bruce, and Fred. 

According to LinkedIn, the study found that U.S. CEOs often have four-letter names -- Bill, Jack, Fred, and the like. (I don't see any four-letter names on the list of top female CEO names, but maybe LinkedIn's analysts temporarily forgot that women run companies too.)

In the United States, LinkedIn analysts say, it's not just CEOs whose name corresponds with their job title. Salespeople often have clippy, four-letter names (think Skip, Chad, and Rich), say the LinkedIn folks. Many engineers have longer, six-letter names like Andrew, Rajesh, and Donald. And, LinkedIn says, food and restaurant industry workers "tend to have longer French names" like Philippe and Laurent.

LinkedIn notes that male CEOs and sales pros may be more likely to use a choppy, monosyllabic nickname (Dave, rather than David) because it sounds more intimate and chummy. On the flip side, LinkedIn says, female executives tend to use their full first name (Judith, instead of Judy) because it sounds more professional.

What do you think? Have you noticed a pattern of first names among specific roles at your organization? Have your shortened your name to sound more friendly and accessible, or ditched your nickname in favor of your full first name to sound more no-nonsense? How about ditching your first name in favor of your middle name in the interest of sounding more professional?

Michelle Goodman is the author of "My So-Called Freelance Life" and "The Anti 9-to-5 Guide." E-mail Michelle at mgoodman@nwjobs.com

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3 Comments

Adrienne Montgomerie on May 3, 2011 8:31 PM | Reply

How interesting! But I dare say the headline is mis-titled. It's not the careers, but the job titles they correlated.

To extend this idea to a little more specificity (or to the actual careers, as implied in the headline), I was just wondering the other day, along with fellow word-smith Shakira Dawud, if our long and easy to misspell names had anything to do with our becoming (gleefully) pernickety wordsmiths.

Astounding how researchers are making use of social media's suddenly public, massive amounts of data. I also learned of a study that plotted break-ups against holidays (thanks to Facebook status updates) and a linguist who mapped variants in pronunciation and syntax across North America thanks to YouTube.

Maybe StatsCan doesn't, after all, need a long-form census anymore.

Adrienne on May 3, 2011 8:35 PM | Reply

Sorry for the typo, Shakirah Dawud. But I guess this proves how hard our names are to spell, and that I am pernickety enough to publicly correct myself.

Jackie Katsianas on May 4, 2011 6:15 AM | Reply

Isn't this more to do with age range of most CEOs and what names were popular when they were born?
Hospitality workers: European guys tend to work on thus industry hence the names quoted. Is the effect the same in France?
Women: the names quoted seem to me (in Australia) to be popular names in the US. Our women senior managers here (only one CEO!) have names that were common for the generation they were born in.
Agree though sales guys seem to like those punchy names. But maybe their dads were similar type and that's where the names came from!

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