Do People Get more Creative with Girls Names?

PaBaMapa. CC-BY-SA 3.0.

If you have read the book Freakonomics, there’s a claim there that people on the whole are rather more conservative when it comes down to picking a name for a boy, whereas they get more experimental with girls. Here in Iceland there is, in fact, a special committee, Mannanafnanefnd, which has to approve all “new” names. Based on the list of available decisions on the committee’s website, we can see that there is in fact no “Gender Gap” when it comes down to innovative naming in Iceland. Out of around three hundred applications to register a new name in the last three years 49% were applications for new boys names.