Isn't it the other way around? The name (birthname or assumed) reflects a person's social identity and thus is related primarily to their gender. It is only ind

Isn't it the other way around? The name (birthname or assumed) reflects a person's social identity and thus is related primarily to their gender. It is only indirectly correlated to their sex (biological makeup), which you cannot directly infer from the name they specify. So I'd say this guesses a person's gender. Somewhat orthogonal is the issue that the guess is binary (m/f). But the thing is, as long as the accurracy is ~80%, the total mismatch rate is much larger than the rate of people that are mismatched because there is no category for them. Obviously, you shouldn't guess someone's sex and or gender and present it to them or others. But this can be used for a lot of other things: - If you have a large dataset of names and other information, but no gender info, and want to see if e.g. women are underrepresented. Even with a weak classifier, you can set bounds. - If you have a real-name, real-data policy, you can use this as a pre-screening to see if the information entered is plausible. It's of course up to you to then do something responsible with that information. I'd prefer to allow pseudonyms or assumed identites in most cases, but sometimes it's not possible (e.g. if this is a egovernment or insurance project).