{"id":2013782,"date":"2023-03-14T04:51:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T08:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress-1016567-4521551.cloudwaysapps.com\/plato-data\/what-are-the-odds-your-superintendent-is-named-michael-john-or-david\/"},"modified":"2023-03-14T04:51:00","modified_gmt":"2023-03-14T08:51:00","slug":"what-are-the-odds-your-superintendent-is-named-michael-john-or-david","status":"publish","type":"station","link":"https:\/\/platodata.io\/plato-data\/what-are-the-odds-your-superintendent-is-named-michael-john-or-david\/","title":{"rendered":"What Are the Odds Your Superintendent Is Named Michael, John or David?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several years ago, when Rachel S. White was compiling a list of every public school district superintendent in the country, she began to notice something peculiar.<\/p>\n

As she flitted from one district website to the next, manually \u2014 and painstakingly \u2014 entering each superintendent\u2019s first and last name into her database, White saw a pattern emerging. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere were a lot of Marks and Scotts and Daves,\u201d she says. \u201cThose names kept coming up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Curious, she started to chart the first names of thousands upon thousands of these district leaders. It was \u201cjust for fun\u201d at first, but has since evolved into a research project four years running. <\/p>\n

White<\/a>, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, recently published data<\/a> for the current school year on gender gaps in the American superintendency. What she found is that, well, a lot of educators work for a superintendent named Michael, John, David or James. <\/p>\n