London: Men, not ladies first! Yes, when it comes to writing names, most people are still sexist, says a new study.
Researchers in Britain have carried out the study and found that putting male names before female names in writing is a remnant of sexist thinking, the British Journal of Social Psychology reported.
“In the 16th century, naming men before women became the acceptable word-order to use because of the thinking that men were the worthier sex. This grammar has continued with “Mr and Mrs”, “his and hers” and the names of romantic couples like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

“While the original sexist ideas behind this grammar are no longer accepted, we wanted to investigate whether the sexist habit of male names coming before female names still holds true and the psychological reasons why this might be,” lead researcher Dr Peter Hegarty of University of Surrey said.
Firstly, the team investigated the modern written context of the Internet. Using 10 popular British boys and girls names and 10 popular American boys and girls names, the team searched the net using each of the possible male-female name pairs as search terms, for both the male name first — i.e., David and Sarah, and then female name first — Sarah and David.
The results of this search found that for the British name pairs, the male-first name pairings accounted for 79 per cent of the mentions, and female-first pairs only 21 per cent.
For the American names this was 70 per cent of the mentions were male-first and 30 per cent for female-first.
Lead researcher Dr Hegarty said: “These results were found to be statistically significant, and support the idea that gender stereotypes still affect the written language.”
“It has been argued that the male-first effect isn’t down to sexism but that it is due to phonological attributes of male names, or because male names come more readily to mind as they are popular and familiar. We therefore tried to investigate whether the male-first finding was a gender stereotyping effect.”     —PTI