Male in one country, female in another: 65 names from birth records

65 names are recorded as predominantly male in one country and predominantly female in another, with at least 1,000 birth registrations and at least 80% one gender on each side. We checked 18,076 names, every name given to at least 500 babies in the United States since 1880, against the counted registration data of seven national statistics offices.

The largest case is Jean: 1,910,805 registrations in France, 100% male, against 483,198 in the United States, 95% female. Same four letters, opposite answers, both from official records.

Correction, 28 September 2026. The first version of this article listed 47 names. It was computed from US counts that were wrong for about 6,800 of the most common American names: a file of yearly percentages had been imported over the official Social Security Administration counts. We restored the official totals and recomputed the list with the same method and thresholds. Nineteen names were added, Alpha dropped out, and the US figures below are now the full 1880 to 2024 totals (Jean, for example, was shown with 38,983 US registrations instead of 483,198). The same correction was applied to the lookup API.

The short version

• 65 of 18,076 names change gender between countries under strict thresholds: at least 1,000 registrations and at least 80% one gender on both sides.
• 26 of the 65 are male in France. 48 are female in the United States. The most common pair is male in France and female in the United States, with 24 names.
• Looser thresholds, full table: at 100 records and 70% on each side, and counting every name that appears in at least two of twelve national registers (the seven above plus Scotland, Northern Ireland, Austria, Poland and Switzerland), the number rises to 479 of 14,174. That version is published as a free CSV with the names that change gender by country dataset.
• The list is a floor, not a ceiling. It uses the seven registers it was first built from, and a name like Andrea, male in Italy and female in Germany, cannot appear at all: neither country publishes national counts.

The full list

Each side shows the country where the name is most often registered with that gender, the share of that gender there, and the number of registrations behind it. Names are ordered by the registrations on both sides together. Names with a published profile link to it.

What the list is made of

A few patterns account for most of it.

French masculine forms that English reads as feminine. Jean, Jeanmarie, Alexis, Patrice, Lilian, Jocelyn, Vivian, Vivien, Marin, Valery and Vianney are male in the French records and female in the English-speaking ones. Laurence, Augustine and Daniele run the other way: female in France, male in the United States (Laurence, Augustine) and Spain (Daniele).

Spanish, Catalan and Galician male names. Joan (Catalan for John), Adria, Marti, Emili and Damia (Catalan Adrià, Martí, Emili, Damià), Angel, Lois (the Galician form of Luis), Toni, Dani and Fran are male in Spain and female in the United States or England and Wales. Reyes and Estel go the other way: female in Spain, male in the United States.

Nordic names. Kim, Ola, Jo and Remi are male in Norway. Eli goes the other way: female in Norway, male in the United States, Canada, England and Wales and France.

Arabic names. Reda and Rida are male in France and Spain. In the United States the same spellings were given mostly to girls.

Surname-style names. Ashley, Bailey, Regan, Henley, Bertie, Bryn, Mckenzie, Bayley and Presley are female in the United States and male in England and Wales. Morgan is male in France and female in the United States.

What this means if you infer gender from names

A country-blind lookup gives each of these names one answer, so it is wrong for one whole population. If 20% of a customer file is French, every Jean in that segment is misclassified, while the error rate for the file as a whole still looks acceptable.

Passing the country fixes it for every name in the table:

curl "https://namegender.com/api/v1/gender?name=Jean&country=FR" -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY"
# gender: male, probability: 100, sample_size: 1910805

curl "https://namegender.com/api/v1/gender?name=Jean&country=US" -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY"
# gender: female, probability: 95, sample_size: 483198

For a spreadsheet, the same thing is a country column in the upload; see adding a gender column to a spreadsheet. For a name that appears in several countries, the /countries endpoint returns every counted country with its own gender and share; the API reference has the details. For unisex names and names whose gender shifted over time, see the name gender guide.

How the list was built

1. Candidates. Every name with at least 500 registrations in the US Social Security Administration files from 1880 to 2024: 18,076 names. Starting from US records means names that are rare in the US are missing, even if they change gender elsewhere.
2. Counts. For each candidate, the counted registrations in the seven countries the list was first built from: the United States (SSA, 1880 to 2024), England and Wales (ONS), France (INSEE, 1900 to 2025), Canada (StatCan), Spain (INE), Ireland (CSO) and Norway (SSB). The periods differ by country, so a share describes that country's whole published record, not a single year.
3. Threshold. A name is listed only if at least one country records it as male and at least one other as female, each with at least 1,000 registrations and at least 80% one gender (rounded to a whole percent). Loosening either threshold makes the list much longer and much noisier.
4. Date. First computed on 11 September 2026 and recomputed on 28 September 2026 after the US counts were restored to the official SSA totals, from the same data the API serves.

A registration count describes how a name was recorded, not how any individual identifies. The list is useful for one purpose: showing where a single worldwide answer is guaranteed to be wrong for a large group of people.

Related: why the country parameter exists, unisex names by country, and why a balanced name in one country rarely is in the next, and our coverage by writing system, including where it fails.