6 ms·
Genderize.io determines the gender of a first name
- Stromgren 13y agoHello. I'm the author of genderize.io. At the time of your comments i was slowly getting this API up and running. A lot of sudden traffic made that a little hard :) At the time, i was utilizing a few lists of officially approved names from a few European countries. We have those in Denmark, where i'm from, among a few other countries. This had led me to believe that most countries had lists like this and i was planning to add them as i went along. I since change my approach, moving from the lists to large datasets of user profiles from social networks. This has given me the chance to update the API, adding probabilistic guesses along with the ability to add localization based filters. My datasets are not that huge yet, but they're constantly growing. Just wanted to say thanks for all the feedback i found in here and give a heads up on the update :)
- mickeyp 13y agoInteresting, but I question its utility, particularly if a name is ambiguous - like "Alex". Also, I tried it with my sister's name, Nanna, and it returned "null." Apparently she's neuter.
- chintan 13y agoNeat! It would be nice to get some sort of "confidence level" - http://api.genderize.io/?name=jackie http://api.genderize.io/?name=jackie
- Stromgren 13y agoA "confidence level" will now be recieved :)
- spaetzel 13y agoMy first test http://api.genderize.io/?name=Erin http://api.genderize.io/?name=Erin gives me "Male"
- rajington 13y agohttp://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Erin http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Erin {"Erin":"mostly_female"} Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
- rajington 13y agohttp://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=jackie http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=jackie {"jackie":"andy"} Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
- ds9 13y agoOn my first try I got an erroneous result on a non-Anglo name: http://api.genderize.io/?name=krishna http://api.genderize.io/?name=krishna returned "male". In fact god names are unisex; I've met a female Krishna. Edit: and "null" on Vishnu. I didn't see on the page whether this is supposed to extend beyond Anglo-American culture. And "kyle" came up "male", tho I can report a female Kyle. Whoever is populating the database may be underestimating gender/naming trends.
- sgustard 13y agoGoes to a synology login page: http://www.genderize.io http://www.genderize.io
- gales 13y agoI wonder what dataset is being used behind the scenes. Tried "Roberta" and it returned "null".
- xutopia 13y agoHow does that site work? It mentions nothing about pricing?
- ronaldx 13y agoIt's strange to believe you can effectively determine gender from a first name - even when concentrating on Anglo-centric names, as this appears to. How is the data generated? By hand? I can imagine this might be somewhat useful if it gave a non-binary result. "Paris" is "male".
- rajington 13y agoParis is "andy" androgynous http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Paris http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Paris Source: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
- nollidge 13y agoOther commenters are already demonstrating that the error rate is way too high to be useful. If you need a user's gender (and you probably don't), just ask them.
- arb99 13y agoHandy for ads.
- omarchowdhury 13y ago{"ashley":"male"}
- fiatmoney 13y agoAlso helpful is: https://github.com/bmuller/sexmachine https://github.com/bmuller/sexmachine which uses a multilingual dictionary, that accounts for names that cross gender in different countries.
- camtarn 13y agoThe underlying dictionary for this, gender/nam_dict by Jorg Michael, is an awesome piece of work: it has entries for each name, its gender (or genders), and how popular that name is in each country where it's used (especially useful for names which are female in one country but male in another country, but where they're much more popular in the former than the latter). It's a bit of an odd file format but it's fairly straight forward to build something which will read it into the language of your choice. http://www.autohotkey.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=22000 http://www.autohotkey.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=22000
- davidu 13y agoPro tip: Don't try to be "too smart" or clever when talking to your users. Being wrong here is so much more tacky than either asking for gender if you need it, or just writing in a gender neutral way. "I'm sorry we were wrong, but our computer determined you have a girl's name. If you change your name, it'll work now."
- fournm 13y agoAnd in more cases than people seem to think, you really don't need it.
- twerquie 13y agoI suspect this is more for data analysis than it is for user-facing features. I hope.
- ddoolin 13y agoThis is far more useful for advertising, especially when trying to build user segments. If you have the gender from the user directly entering it somewhere along the line, great. If not, this comes in.
- tommorris 13y agoYes. Don't attempt to infer gender from names. Mostly, you don't need it. You'll often get it wrong. You may end up pissing off transgender people. Unless you are running a dating site (in which case, you should actually get people to specify which gender(s) they are—and, yes, people will want options beyond male and female) there is no need for it. If you want to know my gender, ask. Don't infer.
- zjgreen 13y agohttp://api.genderize.io/?name=pat http://api.genderize.io/?name=pat
- hadem 13y agoI couldn't find an API, but some might be interested in GenderChecker [0]. [0] http://www.genderchecker.com http://www.genderchecker.com
- NoPiece 13y agoFor people interested in other tools, there is a command line gender verification tool and database: http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/20260-gender-verification-by-forename-cmd-line-tool-db/ http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/20260-gender-verificat... and a Ruby gam that is built on the above data: https://github.com/bmuller/sexmachine https://github.com/bmuller/sexmachine
- rmc 13y agoA "command line gender verification tool"? So it'll verify my gender based from the command line? :P
- alexhawdon 13y agoI ran it... ....I....I.... just want to be alone for a bit.
- kodablah 13y agoAnother DB: http://svn.php.net/viewvc/pecl/gender/trunk/data/nam_dict.txt.bz2?view=log http://svn.php.net/viewvc/pecl/gender/trunk/data/nam_dict.tx...
- rajington 13y agohttp://api.genderize.io/?name=jessie {"jessie":"male"} irb(main):005:0> d.get_gender("Jessie") => :female Not only is it better, it handles cases like androgynous and "mostly male" BRB while I turn this into a web api
- rajington 13y agoDone https://github.com/rajington/genderizer https://github.com/rajington/genderizer and Done http://murmuring-depths-3923.herokuapp.com/?name=jessie http://murmuring-depths-3923.herokuapp.com/?name=jessie http://murmuring-depths-3923.herokuapp.com/?name[0]=peter&name[1]=lois&name[2]=stevie http://murmuring-depths-3923.herokuapp.com/?name[0]=peter&na... Compared to: http://api.genderize.io/?name=jessie http://api.genderize.io/?name=jessie http://api.genderize.io/?name[0]=peter&name[1]=lois&name[2]=stevie http://api.genderize.io/?name[0]=peter&name[1]=lois&name[2]=... I just wanted to learn basic Sinatra, but I might try to do the POST operations too.
- rossriley 13y agoThere's a PECL extension for PHP that claims to provide this too: http://php.net/gender http://php.net/gender Not tested it on too many challenging tasks but it seems to work well too.
- appsappsapps 13y agoFirst two tries: ~ % curl "http://api.genderize.io?name=pat" {"pat":null}% Shouldn't that be "unisex"? ~ % curl "http://api.genderize.io?name=patricia" {"patricia":null}% Hm...
- sksksk 13y agoIt seems to be broken, everything is returning male (or null) curl http://api.genderize.io?name=joe {"joe":"male"} curl http://api.genderize.io?name=jo {"jo":"male"} curl http://api.genderize.io?name=jamie {"jamie":"male"} curl http://api.genderize.io?name=jaime {"jaime":"male"} curl http://api.genderize.io?name=joan {"joan":"male"} curl http://api.genderize.io?name=kelly {"kelly":"male"} curl http://api.genderize.io?name=lucy {"lucy":null}
- _dark_matter_ 13y agoVery broken. Many common male names are returning null as well: curl http://api.genderize.io?name=sean http://api.genderize.io?name=sean {"sean":null}
- rajington 13y agohttp://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=sean http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=sean {"sean":"male"} Heroku's free tier, not nearly as overloaded right now, but still. Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
- kristopolous 13y agoIt's intensely slow too. I just fed it top 10 female names of the 70s and 80s and it got about 30%. It's wrong, slow, and broken. Not a good start.
- rajington 13y agoab -n 100 -c 5 http://api.genderize.io/\?name\=Cameron Total: 636 1373 157.7 1304 1664 ab -n 100 -c 5 http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/\?name\=Cameron Total: 77 141 70.1 115 383 Heroku's free tier, not nearly as overloaded right now, but still. Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
- rajington 13y agohttp://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=joe http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=joe {"joe":"male"} http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jo http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jo {"jo":"female"} http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jamie http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jamie {"jamie":"mostly_female"} http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jaime http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jaime {"jaime":"andy"} http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=joan http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=joan {"joan":"female"} http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=kelly http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=kelly {"kelly":"mostly_female"} http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=lucy http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=lucy {"lucy":"female"} BONUS: http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=jaime&country=ireland http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=jaime&country=ireland {"jaime":"male"} Heroku's free tier, not nearly as overloaded right now, but still. Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer https://github.com/rajington/genderizer
- iamds 13y agoI haven't tried the api yet, but the example on the home page says that "Lois" is a female name - when in fact, in the 1930s it was quite a popular male name with about 70 boys born each year named lois. Checkout http://www.namemeababy.com http://www.namemeababy.com to see the full stats.
- brohee 13y agoCompletely worthless without a national/ethnic hint. E.g. "Jean" will be male if the first name of a French person, while likely female in the US.
- azurelogic 13y agoIt tells me that my daughter's name, Avery, is male, yet it is the 13th most popular name for baby girls right now. Someone needs an updated data set.
- swengw 13y agoIf you're interested in doing this yourself, the book associated with Python's Natural Language Toolkit has a pretty good introduction to identifying gender in the chapter on text classification [1]. [1] http://nltk.org/book/ch06.html http://nltk.org/book/ch06.html
- ape4 13y agoThere has been a perl module that does this for a while http://search.cpan.org/~edaly/Text-GenderFromName-0.32/GenderFromName.pm http://search.cpan.org/~edaly/Text-GenderFromName-0.32/Gende... I see you can add names to its "dictionary" and it give a probability.
- lotsofcows 13y agoApparently I'm "null". I'll assume that's not an attempt to be deliberately offensive. :-)
- tareqak 13y agoThis sort of thing sounds like something Facebook would be very good at doing using Open Graph.
- klous 13y agoI've thought about this before, you also should be able to get a somewhat accurate estimate of the median age of a group of attendees to an event based on the first names alone. See Baby Name Wizard Voyager tool for visualizations of first name occurences since 1900s: http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager
- ronaldx 13y agoI would be impressed by that!
- morrigan 13y agoIf this were for data data analysis then it would have a probability attached.What you have to ask yourself is gender really needed for your application? If not it's best to just avoid it; using guesses is the best way to data corruption.
- erehweb 13y agoWorked on gender-determination for a project for a client in a U.S. male-dominated industry. Baby name gender frequencies by birth year are available online. One interesting wrinkle - can apply simple Bayesian technique - e.g. even if Pat is 50-50 male-female in population at large, firefighter Pat is more likely to be a man.
- random42 13y agoHow well does it compare to https://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/book/ch06.html https://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/book/ch06.html. If the genderize.io folks are listening, can you look at providing some benchmark/test set to evaluate the efficiency of the underlying algorithm?
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoI sanity-checked the service with some common unisex names. Here are the results I got: Unisex: Robin, Alex Female: Kelsey, Carol Male: Leslie, Jodi, Jody, Frankie, Kelly, Marion, Casey, Jamie, Jordan, Mackenzie Null: Pat, Taylor, Dale
- Stromgren 13y agoHey Ryan I think most of these names will result in prober responses now.
- rajington 13y agoIt seems like he deleted my comment from his site's disqus (it's his right) but I rewrote the exact same API in a couple of lines using sexmachine and ruby (I had been meaning to try Sinatra anyway). The source is here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer https://github.com/rajington/genderizer Hosted on heroku's free tier here are some more interesting examples: Basic: http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=peter http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=peter {"peter":"male"} "Mostly" Response: http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Jamie http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Jamie {"Jamie":"mostly_female"} Country (helps with guesses, default USA): http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Jamie&country=great_britain http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Jamie&country=great_br... {"Jamie":"mostly_male"}
- jimeh 13y agohttp://api.genderize.io/?name=Αλεξανδρος http://api.genderize.io/?name=Αλεξανδρος This throws an error and gives us a very pretty stack-trace :)