Yes. According to this working paper, voters in South Carolina preferred "nominally masculine" females over other female candidates. The researchers labelled their work a test of the "Portia Hypothesis, and based their correlation of names to success on the "joint empirical distribution of names and gender in the state’s entire population of registered voters." (Huh?)
To think that we in Michigan thought it all boiled down to an Irish last name.
For what might really going on, check out the New Yorker blog post, "The Surprising Psychology of How Names Shape Our Thoughts." A teaser:
Even the names people choose for their children vary from simple to complex, and that decision determines some of their outcomes later in life. With the psychologists Simon Laham and Peter Koval, I found that people prefer politicians with simpler names—and lawyers in American firms with fluent names rise up the legal hierarchy to partnership more quickly than their non-fluently named colleagues. (The result persisted even when we focussed on Anglo-American names, so it doesn’t simply boil down to xenophobic prejudice.)
Art: Portia and Shylock, Thomas Sully, 1835
