Assessing Gender Equality Progress through Naming Practices in Javanese Society: A Computational Approach

Abstract

Unlike in Western society, Javanese people, the largest ethnic group in Indonesia, do not use family names, but only personal names representing their parents’ hopes. The longer the names, the more aspirations the parents wish for their children. We use this naming practice as a proxy to investigate gender equality progress in Javanese society. Employing a series of quantitative text and statistical analyses on a publicly available massive dataset (N = 2,906,978), we found that despite personal names of both genders getting longer over the years, in general Javanese males have significantly longer names than their female counterparts, confirming our hypothesis. However, as predicted, their name length discrepancies eventually dissipate at different points in time for different regions. We further discuss how these findings may illuminate the progress of gender equality in Javanese society that spread from urban, to suburb, and finally rural areas.