Why Not? & What If?
A podcast about life, work, well-being and the beautiful chaos in between. Hosted by Andy Cracknell, a creative whirlwind and a disruptor of dull thinking and allergies to doing things the usual way. And Siobhán Godden who listens through the noise to what really matters.
Think of Siobhan as the calm in Andy's storm!!!
In each episode, we’ll dig into the stuff that shapes how we live and lead – from gender equality and parenting, to burnout, brave decisions, and big ‘what ifs’.
Why Not? & What If?
The one about names!!
Unpacking surnames, identity choices, legacy dilemmas and why it matters.
Got a story or a view? Email letstalk@whynotwhatif.com
— we might do a follow-up episode with your takes.
Welcome to Why Not and What If?
SPEAKER_03:And
SPEAKER_01:I'm Siobhan Godden, a HR consultant, coach, and the one who listens through the noise to what really matters. Think of me as the calm to Andy's creative storm. Hi. This is Andy Cracknell, creative whirlwind, disruptor of dull thinking, and allergic to doing things the usual way.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks, Siobhan. I'm also a marketing and communications consultant. And this is... The
SPEAKER_01:podcast where we explore the messy, magical intersection of life, work, leadership, and all the bits we're not supposed to talk about. Let's get into it.
SPEAKER_00:Right. This week, we're going to have some fun talking about when people get married, who takes whose surname, if anyone takes anyone's surname. Or double barrels it. Or double barrels it. That adds another level of complexity to the whole problem. Not problem, the whole conversation.
SPEAKER_03:It does. Because where do you go on the line?
SPEAKER_00:So acknowledging that traditionally, and not the worldview, and rightly so, but you would normally have male marrying female and the female would take the male's name. We're going to keep them as person A, person B, genderless because obviously they're same-sex marriages and everything else. So we just need to keep it simple. So we've just been talking about this, having been working on something else and decided that rather than record the topic we were going to record today, we're actually going to record this one about surnames now.
SPEAKER_02:Which basically sums up how we work.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. So it's the... what is it, the distraction or the rabbit hole that we're going to go down and make into an entire episode rather than actually talking about what we were going to talk about in the first place. So to set a frame, so when I married Emma, Emma didn't take my surname. So she is original self and... I am my original self.
SPEAKER_02:Can you take their wives' names?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, that was the other combination that we should go into. So I suppose we might as well kick off by talking about our own situation. So Emma didn't take my name because, one, it was a lot of stress and aggro to change everything. More importantly, professionally, she's known as her full name, so it would have created a branding stroke effect. image stroke identity challenge for her professionally? And thirdly, is it a bit archaic?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Has it got a place anymore?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Now, when she said that she wasn't going to take my surname, it initially stuck in my throat. One, because I was brought up with a fairly traditional view of life. And secondly, because of family background. What's the word? Heritage. Heritage. Yeah. So, There aren't many people, there aren't huge numbers of people with my surname. And at the moment, my three-year-old son is the only one in my arm of the family, which is fairly big, that will carry that surname on because my cousins are all female or they're not the same surname. And neither of my brothers have got kids and it's unlikely, I can't see either of them having kids. My older brother's too old now and my little brother... not going to go into that one basically because he's single and he has been for a long time and I can't see him getting married or having kids any time
SPEAKER_02:soon but yet he never too old is a man
SPEAKER_00:no I know I know and it's tongue in cheek I love my little brother to bits it's a bit of a ribbing that I have with him but he's far too interested in playing with Lego and travelling and doing all kinds of crazy stuff that he does and it's one of the reasons I love him because he goes off and does all this crazy stuff and yeah so good on him so I'm not criticizing him at all. I'm just beating it the way I see it. But then after I kind of sat and thought about it, I was like, well, but is it really a big thing? Now we were talking about this before the time that it, well, one of the occasions it becomes a challenge is when you have kids, if they've got a different surname to you. So if, so one of our children has Emma's surname and our son has my surname is when you're going through, border crossings and stuff for me and so if I travel with my 13 year old we always get pulled over because she's got a different surname to me
SPEAKER_02:yeah and I've had the same experience where I was travelling with my son he was a toddler we actually weren't married at that point or maybe we were I'm not sure but I was definitely travelling on my passport with my maiden name because I was waiting for it to expire before I got a new one because I couldn't see the point in paying an extra 50 quid just to change the name But we got pulled over because he, my husband, he's a fruit drink traveler and he'd gone through security really fast and forgotten about us. I rib him about that all the time because he forgets he's traveling with other people. I was very annoyed at the time. And we got pulled over because I had a different name to my son. So they were like asking him questions like, who is this woman? And he, at the time, he was really shy and really quiet and he was only two. And he just kind of looked at them just to say, what are you on about? And then I didn't want to coach him to say, I'm your mum, because then it looks really dodgy, doesn't it? But it was fine in the end, but it was a real eye-opener.
SPEAKER_00:It's interesting because we crossed the border from France into the UK with our daughter. And one of the comments that the immigration official made was, yeah, I have to ask the questions. This is slightly more complex questions. set of circumstances around this, which I'm not going to go into. But yeah, so one of the comments that the immigration official made was, well, I know you're not kidnapping her and I know she should be with you because she's not kicking off. She doesn't look upset and she's quite bubbly and happy. And she was old enough at that point to have been distressed had she not been with us, if that makes sense. But the initial flag was the difference in surnames, which was really interesting.
SPEAKER_02:And you get it, right? I get it. they've got to have some checks for kidnappings and all of these kind of things. So it's actually in some ways quite reassuring. But we're thinking about this from a very practical perspective. Is that enough of a reason to take on? But for me, I wanted the same name as my kids. It wasn't actually my husband's name. It was because it was my kid's name. But then you've got a question, well, why is it that the kids automatically take the dad's name?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and again, you see, that's the thing, because the only real value in that is the heritage thing. As I said, my surname's not particularly common, so there's an element of me that romanticises the fact that I'm carrying that name on, but then in the grand scheme of things, does it matter? Because in... So I did my family tree a few years back and we've gone right back to the 1100s or right back. And our surnames changed about seven or eight times in a thousand years. It was originally Craik, which is C-R-A-I-K, then C-R-A-I-C, which is funny because if you think about the Irish word or the Irish expression, what's the crack? Yeah, absolutely. Which is a Mickey take I quite often get when people haven't seen me for a long time. What's the crack, right? Yeah, and then it was extended when the origins went into Norfolk, so it became Cracknell. And yeah, so there's that. But continuing on now isn't really a big thing. But then you mentioned earlier about hyphenating, and this was something that we toyed with the idea of doing. And when you've got a double-syllable surname like mine,
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You try double-barrelling that with anything, it just sounds so pompous. It's ridiculous. But if the names are right, it's quite nice and exciting to create something new, like a creative name.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:absolutely.
SPEAKER_02:Actually, you reminded me. So my parents have friends that they've had for a really long time, and they met at a dance club or something. This couple were about to get married. And what was interesting was his name was Hoare, H-O-A-R-E. And she originally refused to get married to him because she didn't want to become Hoare. Can we say this on here? But anyway, so he actually changed his name to Horton. So their family is now called Horton, but his parents, his siblings, they're all still Hoare.
SPEAKER_00:His first name's not Colin, is it? No. No, okay. Because I know someone with exactly the same story whose first name is Colin who lives in and around Bedfordshire Stroke, that area.
SPEAKER_02:Really? Yeah. No, these people live down in my neck of the woods down further south. But it was always a point of discussion that my parents had because it was quite an interesting take on it, isn't it? But your point about seeing how names change. So my husband's family name derives from So they made shoes back in the day in Kent or somewhere. Now, my family name on my Irish side has changed a bit like yours when it was Oberhan originally. Then it got shortened and shortened to Behan eventually. But my granddad was actually adopted. So that also has an interesting connotation. It's like, will it be even his name?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Really? It's his name. And therefore... Yeah. Wow. So everybody that was born as a result of your grandfather actually probably shouldn't even be B and they should be something else. Should be as in old.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. We're going to follow the traditional lines. So when you open the can of worms, quite an interesting.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. You see that, that does raise an interesting one. And then there's another bit, which is, and this is a bit tongue in cheek, but there's always a status thing as well about double barreling. So my mum's mum was, an incredibly well-to-do social figure. And when she married my grandfather, my grandfather's surname was Brown and her surname, my grandmother's surname was Eversfield. So they double-barreled it to Eversfield Brown. There's so many stories I could tell, but it would get me in so much trouble.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:a different kind of podcast, maybe.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I think my interpretation based on the years of stories my mum told me was that that was all around. It was a status thing. Having a double-barrelled surname was seen as a high society. Yeah. Really quite prestigious thing. Like, look at Camilla, Camilla Parker Bowles. It's that kind
SPEAKER_02:of... Kind of
SPEAKER_00:old
SPEAKER_02:money,
SPEAKER_00:isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Old money. And... Gentry, that's the word I was looking for. It's a gentry thing, which in itself is a misogynistic term, but we won't go down that rabbit hole. So the double-barrelling thing is interesting. And then there's a bit with, it's not cartography. What is it called where you come up with names? I'm going to have to Google this because there's a word for it. Hang on. What is the study? Oh, onomatology or onomatics, that's it.
SPEAKER_03:So
SPEAKER_00:the study of names is called onomatics or onomatology. And it encompasses the study of the origin history and use of proper names, including personal names like anthro... I can't say that. Anthroponyms and place names, which are toponyms, but we'll leave the toponyms out of it. That's the only reference, the only intellectual reference we're going to make at this point. I'm not saying those words again because we'll be here all year. But... you made a point earlier about your husband's family history being cobblers in kent somewhere and your parents male friend surname being whore and around the allocation of names way back
SPEAKER_03:yeah
SPEAKER_00:and if you look in you know if you look at surnames you've got things like goldsmith silversmith farrier yeah Blacksmith, tailor. Yeah, they're all trades or crafts and stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Did you know this is why smiths is most common name?
SPEAKER_00:I didn't. Go on.
SPEAKER_02:Because smiths were the blacksmiths or the goldsmiths or whatever. They weren't sent to war because they were making the armory, preparing the horses. So they lived longer than other families because they weren't killed in war. There you go.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. See, it's educational, this podcast, as well as waffle. Yeah. And I mean, there's so much. I suppose it's what drives our identity, right? Everybody's curious about where they've come from and what the history is. And I quite like that TV show. Who do you think you are? Celebrities go back and find out what their ancestry are.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But then it also, you know, even in this, what, 20 minutes we've been, 10 minutes we've been talking, that we've come up with so many variables as to how names, surnames are built and designed and everything else, from they represent a trade through to being double-barreled because of the presentation it gives and everything else. What was interesting, though, was my grandparents... double-barrelled their surname, or rather, my grandmother double-barrelled their surname. My grandfather wasn't that bothered. But then my mum and her two brothers have gone back to my grandfather's name. So my uncles are both Brown. And my mum's maiden name was Brown. And then, so it just shows that there's a blip in the family tree where the two families came down. One was Eversfield, one was Brown. My grandmother and grandfather got married, became Eversfield Brown, and then below them, they went back to being Brown again. So there was this new name that came into it and then disappeared as quickly. But as we're more or better equipped with websites like Ancestry and stuff like that, we can go back and look at history. There's also a trend or not a trend as such, but a movement of people changing their names back to what was historically Brown.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and I've got a couple of cousins, actually, that have done that with my name, my maiden name. They've gone back to the old Celtic Gaelic, Old Bearharn.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Was that sentiment or was it...
SPEAKER_02:It was sentiment, but I think, again, it's a cultural thing of, you know, I mean, Irish have got, I can say this because I'm one of them, have got a chip on their shoulder about history and history. how we were treated and, you know, all of those things. And there is a, I think there's a research in terms of the cultural element of let's remember who we are and go back to who we are, what makes us us, I suppose. But that's actually another tangent to this, isn't it? Because we're talking about this in a very Western way. And, well, actually, probably quite a British way because, you know, I know Scandinavians have a different approach to naming names. You know, like you have Ericsson, who's essentially the son of Eric. So they're actually looking at the first name rather than the surname.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Which is super interesting. And then you've got the Eastern, which have an even more complicated way of looking at it. They have really long names because they just keep adding them on, don't they?
SPEAKER_00:Do you know what? It's really interesting because I wish we'd thought about that element before we started talking about this because I don't know. how the structures work for Persian, Indian, Middle Eastern families. But I do know that it's fascinating when you look at their name structures. They take elements from different names. I can't remember how it works, but it's really, really fascinating. So maybe this is one we need to pick up on an extension podcast around Middle Eastern names and Persian names specifically, so Iraqi names and Iranian names.
SPEAKER_02:be an interesting thing though because we've started this conversation thinking about it from a culture of masculine culture the western world is centralised around men so you take the man's name the man is the head of the family etc etc and it highlights the fact that we are in that we are still in that culture even though we've taken strides in terms of equal opportunities and we're not massively, you know, misogynistic anymore. I like to think in the UK anyway, there's still elements of it, but we are still inherently a masculine culture.
SPEAKER_00:So the other element here is almost like a global heritage thing where if you think back to the Second World War and the persecution that we're faced in certain communities, specifically the Jewish community during the war, where people would changed their names or falsified documents so that they were able to cover their Jewish heritage to reduce the risk of them being persecuted. This came up in my family tree where somebody from that generation had a predominantly or obviously Jewish name, but it was then changed to something else. But then there was somebody else in my family who moved to the UK straight after the Second World War who had a very German surname.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:who then changed their name to a more British-sounding name. The obvious example in our country is the fact that the royal family are actually Germans. And their, I say proper name, I don't mean any disrespect by that, but their proper name is Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which came into the royal family in about 1840 when Queen Victoria married Prince Albert. And there's documentaries about this, where the Queen and Prince Philip decided that I think it was the Queen and Prince Philip decided that they were going to change their surname to Windsor because it wasn't appropriate given the war against the World War and the fact that we were fighting the Germans for the UK to be seen to have a German monarchy.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So there's also the and I use the word amiably but there's also the manipulation of people's names because of social or social is the wrong word but Political reasons like the persecution of the Jews in the Second World War and then Germans moving to territories that were enemies during the Second World War. Absolutely. So it creates that question mark over people. You know, I quite often hear people say, you know, yeah, but my surname wasn't this 100 years ago. It was X and it was done because of this reason. So the whole thing around surnames is really interesting.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and I was in New York. recently and I went to that immigration the immigration museum at Staten Island and it reminded me of a scene from The Godfather where they're all queuing up at Ellis Island not Staten Island they're all queuing up in Ellis Island to register and what they did was they ended up taking the name of the place they came from so with Corleone it came from Corleone and that became their name even though it was And I wasn't quite sure if it was a, it's just easy to just call them by the name they've come from. They didn't care about their actual name or what it was, or if it was a conscious thing to link them to their roots. But yes, there's a lot of, you know, third, fourth generations in America who have a different surname of the place they originated from rather than their name.
SPEAKER_00:That just reinforces this thing around the value of a surname and the reasons behind changing it and what, what, thoughts and considerations might be going into play when people are thinking about changing their surnames?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. It's a complex thing, isn't it? But it goes back to where are you roots? What does it mean to you? And I suppose it goes back to as well traditional family values to a certain degree. I've got friends who didn't take their husband's name. And we talked about the airport stuff. But it's also come up with the challenges in schools and things as well because they have a different name. Even in this day and age where you have single parents and you have, you know, real, what do they call it? I have different, you know, just different family setups now. Even then, even with that, there's still an assumption that you are, my friend gets quite annoyed and actually she has got divorced now, but she never took her husband's name and it annoyed her that the teacher, she just referred to her as Mrs. their name. because that wasn't her name. And there was that assumption there, which is an interesting dynamic, isn't it? I actually regret a little bit not keeping my maiden name as a professional name. And actually, I might go back to it. There's nothing to stop me. I might just start going by my name, because that's essentially who I am in my head. Mrs. Gordon is my mother-in-law.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So I am still Siobhan Behan. So... I could have my professional me, but my family me, which has the same name as my family, but we've both took it from a very practical perspective. And this is so unromantic, but my husband wasn't even that bothered about getting married. In fact, he didn't really want to get married. He was like, I can't really see the point. What's the point in it? We've got our family because we had our son by that point. But it came down to practicalities. It came down to things like this is the sort of way we think you know one of us ends up in a coma who are they going to listen to like legally you know and parental responsibilities and stuff like that even though he was on the kids birth certificate he had to he still didn't have the same parental rights unless we were married it's all very archaic now so we just thought I've thought it practically we'll just get married and I'll take their name because it makes life easier but maybe that's because we're lazy Well,
SPEAKER_00:hang on, because that's the why not and what if of this conversation, isn't it? So you've just said, well, there were legal reasons to protect your husband as a parent, and you used the word archaic rules. So it actually goes to show that the system is wrong, because if a father... and this is going to come out the wrong way, but if a father has to marry the mother of his kids to have the same legal rights as the mother, it's the system that's wrong, not him doing that for that reason. So then the question is, so what if they change the rules and said, as long as you're biologically the parent, mother or father of a child, you have equal rights or the same rights, what would happen to marriage numbers then?
SPEAKER_02:Well, and what's interesting, because you made a good point, so they have developed the system a little bit, so you can get parental rights, but it's another process you have to go through, and I'm not even sure that a lot of people are aware of this, because I wasn't until I had a child and was like, oh my God, there's this whole thing. So, and we weighed it up, because we can go through that process, that legal process, where he gets all the full parental rights, but then we still have the issue with next of kins and medical cares and all these kind of things. And actually, when we weighed it all up, it's just easier just to get married. And my brother did the same thing. He was actually quite against getting married. He didn't like the whole idea of it. He didn't like the idea of a wedding. But they also got married because it was just, actually, we can do all these 10, 20 different pieces of paperwork or we just get married. Let's just get married. It's an excuse for it.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But it's also an excuse for a massive piss up at the end of the day as well, which is, I mean, any excuse for a
SPEAKER_02:party. Well, we took that and it was a great day. Everyone had to wait. And actually, as a funny story about our wedding is that because of our age, we were in our early thirties when we got married. All the women of our age, but I'm not talking about our grandparents and stuff, but all the women were either pregnant or about to get pregnant. Thanks to our wedding. Or got pregnant at the
SPEAKER_03:wedding.
SPEAKER_02:So it was hilarious. But yeah, it, it, you know, none of, neither of us regret getting married by any stretch of the imagination, but it was just an interesting thought process of why we got there. And then the name thing was just, it's just easier.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, look, there's some random statistics for you. So I think I mentioned this in one of the previous podcasts, but one of my sidelines is, is a wedding photographer and the, um, I still do it, but I don't proactively market it. And the reason I don't proactively market it is because the industry is saturated. In 2022, there were 50,000 registered professional photographers with Companies House. Every year in the UK, there are 150,000 weddings. Right. Maybe 70% of those weddings Sorry, 30% wouldn't want or have a wedding photographer. The other 70% would. So that takes it down to about 120,000 weddings that want a wedding photographer. So if you're sharing 120,000 weddings with 50,000 wedding photographers, that's two and a bit weddings per year per photographer. What hasn't helped is the evolution of things like iPhones and smartphones where the quality of the camera itself not wanting to get technical, but 40-odd megapixel cameras now can do the same thing as what a professional camera did in the mid-2010s, so 2014, 2015. And one of the things that I used to get really hacked off with at weddings, we're going to have to do a podcast on wedding photography and I can tell you all some stories, was that it got to a point, the last four or five weddings, except for the last wedding I shot, the last four or five weddings prior to that, I would be fighting people to remove their mobile phone from my shot of the bride and groom.
SPEAKER_02:You've got to sign it up. See, that's where a photographer earns their value, is the lighting and knowing how to angle the shot and all those kind of things. But then you get everyone just trying to take a
SPEAKER_03:picture of
SPEAKER_00:you. And that's the problem. But, The number of weddings has dropped by about 15% since then. Now, it's a bit of a dummy day to that because you've got difference in birth rates and the age, the generations and what age they get married and everything else. But the point is, is that marriage is on the decline. The other thing is when, so Emma and I were originally going to get married in the May, which was literally two months after the first lockdown. really long complicated story short we had to cancel our wedding four times and then when we got married eventually got married it was in a registry office rather than the festival style wedding we had planned there were only six of us there there was our daughter my dad her mum and dad and emma and i and the registrar and her assistant we weren't allowed guests there was no post-wedding party we had a wedding breakfast in in a restaurant and we've been saying since we want to do the original wedding, we have planned, but life has gotten in the way of money and everything else. But the value, I think the point here is the value of a wedding, if you step aside from the name thing at the moment, is that there's a cultural shift around people who believe in getting married versus those who don't, which will naturally impact the name thing anyway, because if people aren't getting married, the name takeover or not takeover is going to change anyway. So it almost reduces the debate. Now, is that exciting for the future? Well, does it mean that the certain names will die out possibly? But, you know, it'd be interesting to gauge what impact that's going to have on, on,
SPEAKER_02:But then names can die out anyway. The birth rate also going down. That could be the death of names.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. But here's a final thought for you that will mess with your head for the rest of the weekend because it has mine for months. So we're looking at global birth rates at the moment. Male versus female, it's about 50-50. I
SPEAKER_02:know what you're going to say now because I read the same thing, I think.
SPEAKER_00:How does that happen? Because there's no... annual conference of sperm or eggs that sit there and goes, right, the population of men, male is this, the population of female is this, so we're going to allocate X number of you to become boys and X number of you to become girls. And I know there's other genders, I get all that. But how does nature, what is this power that's keeping the gender balance about 50-50? And it fluctuates more than one or two percent.
SPEAKER_02:Less, because this is where I thought you were going, as I read an article about it, and less as a war. More boys are born.
SPEAKER_00:Why?
SPEAKER_02:Nobody knows. It's just the stats say after a war, more boys are born. I think there's slightly more boys born generally because boys are weaker physically. So more baby boys die than female babies.
SPEAKER_03:So
SPEAKER_02:to even that out, there's slightly more boys born. Although that might have evened out the revolution anyway because that's not really the case anymore. But yeah, there is a surge. After a major war, there's a surge of boys born. So something happens in nature.
SPEAKER_00:But logically, this is getting a bit dark, but if you take most wars, it's the men that are dying. But how do the eggs and sperm know that that's the case and therefore create a boy? I suspect it's probably something to do with stress hormones or a state of mind or a chemical imbalance in the body around the fact that it's a war.
SPEAKER_02:There's got to be something, hasn't there? But it's super, super interesting. that this is the bit with this when you think about nature and the fact we even have babies when you think about it is a blimmin miracle in itself let alone when you add that kind of level of complexity to it it's fascinating
SPEAKER_03:yeah
SPEAKER_00:that's really freaky and then okay so if there are more boys born after wars there has to be a sense of leveling at some point after that because loads of boys are born, which then takes the male populace even higher than the 50%. Yeah. It then has to increase the number of girls that are born or, and it balances.
SPEAKER_02:And actually, I saw this in real life, not after a war, but I used to be a chair of governors for a primary school. And it's a little village primary school. So it literally has one form entry, one class. And because it's a village, it's very affected by population. So when you're looking at pupil numbers, because pupil numbers equals money, Because there was only a certain number of families, it would affect the number of kids in the school. But we had one year group where there was 16 children joining the school. 15 of them were boys, one girl. To the extent that that mother of that one girl was like, I don't know if I should send her here. She did in the end. But the year later, it was reversed. There was 15 girls and one boy.
SPEAKER_00:that somebody's doing something somewhere here.
SPEAKER_02:Something odd, isn't it? And so what the school ended up doing was they ended up combining those two year groups for things like PE and stuff, and they evened it out. But that was a real micro level where you can see, in the generational, it's going to be really even, but in that year group, it had a massively...
SPEAKER_00:But it is, we're getting really off topic, but it is geographical as well because there are, I can't remember and this might be wrong, but there was something around the populace in China or Japan where one or other had a massive deficit. I think it's, I think it's Japan. There's double the number of men that there are women or it's the other way around.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:No, I think.
SPEAKER_02:Men can't find wives. That was the thing. There's literally not enough girls.
SPEAKER_00:And that, but globally, it's about, I think it's 49% women, 51%, sorry, 49% female, 51% male. And that figure's fairly static over a
SPEAKER_03:40,
SPEAKER_00:50, 60 year period. But the thing about, when you mentioned that thing about wars, that resonated. And I remember, because the year Otto was born, so Otto's now three, that was a really low birth year.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:We're now, we've got a pick of the local schools which ones put them into because they're all scrabbling for the small handful of children that there are there.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So then it begs the question then about how that's going to balance out low birth year versus high birth year because I was a school governor for a while and I remember that being the challenge is, oh God, we've got a low birth year coming up in two years.
SPEAKER_02:And if you have a high birth year and you have loads of kids arriving, you know the next year is going to be low because people don't have babies every year usually. So you think statistically all those families that have had a baby, they're probably going to wait a couple of years before they have another one. So we kind of assume the next year is going to be lower and it is mad.
SPEAKER_00:Final question on that particular topic. I know three or four families that have got eight, nine, ten kids plus and two out of those three are all boys except one girl in each and then the other one is fairly mixed. Now, I vaguely... So there are animals out there that... Is it penguins or chickens or something that the temperature that the egg sits in dictates whether it's going to be a boy or a girl?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, there's an element of that, but there's also the sperm, isn't there? Some men have more cell sperms than boy sperms, for example.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. That's got to be it. No, that doesn't make sense. We need to get... Yeah, we need to find a... genetic i'm going to do that right i'm going to find a geneticist on linkedin and say we do a podcast and we've come up against this problem and we need someone to explain this shit to us right going back to the original point i can't even remember what the original point was but you know all that was it so the system's broken because okay outdated because The biological birth mother has instantly more rights than the birth father if they're not married. Why should a couple have to get married just for the dad to get equal rights? It's not about the rights. It's about the knock-on effect that if they change the rules, which they should, so that everybody's equal as a biological parent, what impact that would have on surnames, because then fewer people given... survey statistics data everything else would get married what impact would that have on then the longevity of surnames and I think it would end up where you would end up with fewer of each surname and a higher variety of surnames so there'll be more surnames and fewer of each
SPEAKER_02:the other question is around does it matter anymore that the family unit has the same name
SPEAKER_00:yeah yeah that's really interesting because my own family is There are two surnames, so our kids are different surnames. There's one family I do know where there are three different surnames amongst the kids. Really? And the impact of that, that's a separate topic completely, but there's an identity question.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely, and this is the other thing. Does it affect identity one way or another? As
SPEAKER_03:we
SPEAKER_02:were saying, I still identify as Siobhan Behan, even though my name is now Siobhan Codden. But if you have got a family unit with different names in, what impact does that have on the children? And then why does society think? It's an interesting point.
SPEAKER_00:Unsurprisingly, we've opened up a whole can of other potential topics. So if anybody's heard anything in this podcast that they particularly want us to look into, drop us an email because we've just increased our podcast list by about 50, haven't we?
SPEAKER_02:We have, and it's going to be hard to market this podcast.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's just a variety of all kinds of random conversations, right? It
SPEAKER_03:is, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Sitting with your mates in a pub on a Friday night like we used to. We don't do that, but like we used to. The random topic of conversation that comes up. There we go. All right, well, that'll do for another week.
SPEAKER_02:Until next time.
SPEAKER_00:Until the next one. Well, that's it for this episode of Why Not and What If, where the conversations get messy, magical and a little bit rebellious. If it made you think, laugh or rage text your mates, job done. That's what we're here for. Got a topic you think we should dive into? Drop us a line at letstalk at whynotwhatif.com. Seriously, your ideas fuel this chaos. And don't forget to follow, subscribe, shout about us in your WhatsApp groups, on LinkedIn and come back next week for more brutally honest, occasionally unhinged and always human conversations. See you next time.
