I estimate preference for passing on businesses to sons by examining how common words son and sons are compared to daughter and daughters in the names of businesses.
In the US, all businesses have to register with a state. And all states provide a way to search business names, in part so that new companies can pick names that haven’t been used before.
I begin by searching for son(s) and daughter in states’ databases of business names. But the results of searching son are inflated because of three reasons:
sonis part of many English words, from names such asJasonandRobinsonto ordinary English words like mason (which can also be a name).sonis a Korean name.- some businesses use the word
sonplayfully. For instance,sonis a homonym of sun and some people use that to create names likeson of a beach.
I address the first concern by using a regex that only looks at words that exactly match son or sons. But not all states allow for regex searches or allow people to download a full set of results. Where possible, I try to draw a lower bound. But still some care is needed in interpreting the results.
Data and Scripts: https://github.com/soodoku/sonny_side
In all, I find that a conservative estimate of son to daughter ratio is between 4 to 1 to 26 to 1 across states.