Should I change my name?

I check Twitter every day, but LinkedIn, not so much. So I completely missed that something went viral this week: apparently women in The Netherlands are changing their first name on the platform to Peter, to raise awareness of the fact that in our country there are more CEOs called Peter than there are CEOs who are women.

Men are also joining this playful campaign, by changing their first name to Petra. There is even a toolkit to help them with it!

The fact that there are so few female CEOs is pretty shocking indeed. But will changing names on LinkedIn for a week make any difference? Should I change my name as well?

I had an interesting discussion about this at work today. One colleague, while very much in favor of diversity & inclusion, decided not to change her name on LinkedIn. With a very good reason: her name means too much to her. She explained how her parents very deliberately chose it and also how her last name has great meaning to her. I was moved by her story, because to me, my name also means a lot.

And I guess it does to you as well. Our name is not just something practical, it is part of our identity. I can’t imagine being anyone other than Patrick Sanwikarja.

Will the ‘Peter/Petra’ campaign raise awareness? Most definitely. LinkedIn has great reach after all. But next week the names will be changed back and there will still be more Peters at the top than women.

Perhaps this week’s action should be followed by another campaign, by a very specific group of people: the CEOs. In LinkedIn, they can type anything in the name fields, right? I wonder who has the guts to change their first name to “I’m CEO” and their last name to “mostly because I’m a man”.