Alex, Isabella and Math

I stumbled upon a link the other day: observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2068023,00.html

Girls with “feminine names” are less likely to study advanced math or physics, new research concludes. Abigail, Lauren and Ashley, considered less feminine names by the researchers, are more likely to study high-level math and physics than their sisters with the more feminine names of Anna, Elizabeth and Emma.

The effect is so strong that parents can set twin daughters off on completely different career paths simply by calling them Isabella and Alex, names at either end of the spectrum. A study of 1,000 pairs of sisters in the US found that Alex was twice as likely as her twin to take maths or science at a higher level.

What in the name of weird science is this? I have a hard time understanding that people have so much time on their hands that they complete these studies. I find it even odder that there is so much money floating around that somebody was paid for it. Apparently they came up with a mathematical formula to rate a name's femininity and Ashley isn't very feminine. Hmmm...it looks like they injected their biases. :-(

I know it's just one data point, but I did a little research on my own. I plugged in "Alex Isabella and Math" into Google. The first two links were to the story quoted above. The very next one was for a Math professor named...you guessed it, Isabella who co-authored (among others) a paper with an Alex. Here's what she has to say:

We construct minimal cellular resolutions of squarefree monomial ideals arising from hyperplane arrangements, matroids and oriented matroids.

Yeehaw! Let's ask the twins whose names frame the femininity rating scale what they think of all of this: