“Karen” is having a moment — and that’s not a good thing. You’ve seen her at Red Lobster, stuck in traffic with Kidz Bop, racial profiling a Filipino man chalking “Black Lives Matter” outside his home and Black women at their apartment complex pool, and with her dog off leash endangering a Black man’s life in Central Park.
But how did the name Karen become cultural flashpoint “Karen” — an entitled middle-aged White woman who needs to speak to the manager?
First, culturally: In her book, Race After Technology, scholar Ruha Benjamin explains that a name is not just a name: “Naming a child is serious business. And if you are not White in the United States, there is much more to it than personal preference.” Names can have real-world effects including influencing the chance you’ll get a callback for a job and making it impossible to submit an online college application. The “Karen” meme is exposing White women, some for the first time, to stereotyping.
Second, by popularity: According to baby name data from the Social Security Administration (which doesn’t include race/ethnicity and only categorizes by binary male/female gender), the name Karen first appeared in the female Top 20 in 1941 and spent 30 years there until it dropped out in 1971. By the 1990s, the name had fallen out of the Top 100.
Chances are you don’t know too many babies named Karen today, but when the name hit its peak at #3 in 1965, Karens were everywhere. (Important context: the US was 88.6% White at the time, so it’s safe to assume many Karens are White). It’s this swift rise and fall in popularity that’s made Karen the name so era defining and made “Karen” the meme a perfect caricature of women of a certain age and a certain privilege.
Charting the name’s popularity got us thinking: are there other names that are equally as “Karen” as Karen?
To put this question to the test, we checked baby names from the last 100 years and eliminated those that: 1) never made it into the Top 20 most popular names in any year and 2) were not present in the top list for at least 50 out of 100 years. That left us with 129 female names and 76 male names (yes, we’re going there too!). We tested each of these names, looking for the ones that most closely matched Karen’s rise and fall in popularity.
To find the closest match, we calculated the correlation between any name’s popularity over time compared to Karen’s. A correlation of 1 is a perfect match; a correlation of -1 is a name that rose and fell in popularity in the exact opposite way that Karen did (an “anti-Karen”, if you will); and the closer to 0 the correlation gets, the less that name’s popularity is like either “Karen” or “anti-Karen”. Since we’re looking for names most like Karen, we’ll focus on those that are a strong match, or anything with a correlation above 0.7. So, without further ado, introducing...
THE OTHER
KARENS
FEMALE “KARENS” Recently there’s been debate about whether “Karen” is a racist or sexist slur akin to using the n-word. It’s not. Need more convincing? Take it from someone named Karen herself. Need even more? Sounds like you need to check out the resources in our authors’ note. But, if you’re simply just tired of seeing the name Karen everywhere, we’ve got you covered. Here are the names to use instead for women of the same age, generation, and White privilege. (Our apologies to all the Deborahs, Debbies, and Debras.)