What should you call a male ‘Karen’? I checked the data.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shed an unflattering light on some members of our society. While most of us have pulled together to act in the best interests of others, many, instead of suffering some minor inconveniences, have proposed an alternative: maybe it’d be best if some other people died. In internet parlance, this type of extreme entitlement is often personified as a Karen.
The Karen archetype, to be clear, predates the pandemic. The term, more generally, describes a middle-aged, white, often-racist, always-entitled woman. It’s not clear why Karen became the de facto name for entitlement, but it may relate to the name’s distinct association with women of a certain age. Births of girls named Karen peaked during the baby boomer generation in the late 1950s.
Yet, Karen is not the only name whose heyday coincided with the boomer generation. To find out others, I calculated the squared difference between Karen’s popularity and all other girl’s names. For each name, a year is scored from 0–100, where 100 represents the most popular year. I then compared the names year-by-year. Names with smaller calculated differences will be those whose periods of popularity coincided more closely with those of Karen.
The relative ubiquity of Karens might be why they were chosen as the stereotype of entitlement; more than 880,000 Karens have been born since 1945
Women named Brenda, Pamela, or Theresa (among others) might count themselves lucky not to carry the entitlement stigma. Of all girl names relating to at least 250,000 births since 1945, these are the names whose popularity most closely coincides with that of Karen.
The relative ubiquity of Karens might be why they were chosen as the stereotype of entitlement; more than 880,000 Karens have been born since 1945. In contrast, Brendas account for 556,000 births, Pamelas 569,000, and Theresas only 285,000.
Entitlement and privilege are, of course, not distinctly female traits. Using the same approach as before, I found the male name accounting for at least 250,000 births since 1945 which most closely resembles the Karen trend.
For men, the name Terry went in and out of vogue at much the same time as Karen
The Terrys of the world might consider themselves lucky to have avoided the stigma; accounting for >338,000 births since 1945, the name Terry went in and out of vogue at much the same time as Karen.
As before, the alternative isn’t a name you’ll encounter as frequently as women named Karen. If you want a more prominent name — one which accounts for >500,000 births since 1945 — there’s one name that closely follows the Karen trend.
It’s Donald.
This analysis was done using R and visualised using ggplot2. If you — for some reason — have a thing for reading analyses of birth name data you might enjoy my post on how US president’s names influence name popularity or how Hurricane Katrina caused a decline in the popularity of the name Katrina.
Originally published at http://www.nathancunn.com.
