6 ms·

Show HN: An API for gender classification

18 points by heynk 13y ago

joshfraser 13y ago
I started searching for the most gender ambiguous names I could think of like "Jesse", "Alex", "Erin", etc. The best one I've found so far is "Angel" at 51.1% male.
- a_bonobo 13y ago
  Jessie has exactly 50.0000% :)
- wging 13y ago
  Jamie does pretty well. 50.24%. Jaime is further from 50%.
- dmpatierno 13y ago
  How about the worst score for an unambiguous name? I got 56.3% male for "David".
- cclogg 13y ago
  This is pretty fun lol. I searched for Santa and it said 99% female haha.
  - Renaud 13y ago
    Apparently god is overwhelmingly male at 99.998179%
- cycrutchfield 13y ago
  "Kelly" is 50.16% female, surprisingly
- arocks 13y ago
  There is an entire Wikipedia page on Unisex names [1]. Most Punjabi Sikh first names are applicable to both genders. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name
- code_duck 13y ago
  Adrian, 51.067064%
robinjfisher 13y ago
My name has a 50.444139% chance of being female. In the present case, the API is, unfortunately, incorrect.
- Dewie 13y ago
  My name has 99.99...% chance of being male. But when I change it to the English/Anglophone version, the chance is only 60.641%.
hnriot 13y ago
why bother with a naive bayes classifier, why not just use the dictionary, when it matches the percentage is simple the ratio of the genders? I don't see the need for a classifier, I was hoping it was going to do something clever like guess the gender of a document's author.
bwp 13y ago
Microsoft is unknown, Linux is male, and Apple is female.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  BSD is unknown.
shobhitjain26 13y ago
my Name is unknown . http://gender.hankstoever.com/classify/shobhit http://gender.hankstoever.com/classify/shobhit
kirchhoff 13y ago
John - 57.3% ?
- ddeck 13y ago
  Definitely some odd results: Michael = 52%, Thomas = 62% (although Tom = 98%)
  - markcampbell 13y ago
    Thomassina is a woman's name, FWIW.
    - yen223 13y ago
      Thom is 99.999963% male though.
  - VolatileVoid 13y ago
    I know a female Michael.
  - CatsoCatsoCatso 13y ago
    Yup. 'Eric' (which often becomes Erica for females) scored a 10% higher chance of being male than 'John' did (Eric = 66.854585% while John = 57.399103%). What's also surprising is the dramatic change the Anglicizing of the name brings: 'Erik' = 91.939346% while 'Eric' = 66.854585%
- yen223 13y ago
  Could it be caused by 'John' being a common last name?
sdegutis 13y ago
"Permelia"[1] is definitely a girl's name[2]. [1]: http://blog.xkcd.com/2014/01/31/the-baby-name-wizard/ http://blog.xkcd.com/2014/01/31/the-baby-name-wizard/ [2]: http://gender.hankstoever.com/classify/Permelia http://gender.hankstoever.com/classify/Permelia
onion2k 13y ago
While it's a quite interesting coding task to write a classifier, for the overwhelming majority of applications you simply don't need to know a user's gender. Making it a public API is a bad thing. Developers have a horrible tendency to gather as much data on someone as possible, everything they're willing to give in fact, for the simple reason of "just in case we need it later". It's far, far better to gather as little as possible and build something that simply doesn't need to know specifics. If we build things that are ambiguous, unspecific for age, gender, race, nationality, etc then the world will be a better and more inclusive place. Paradoxical as it seems, more privacy actually leads to a more integrated society. That is universally a good thing (in my opinion, obv.).
splitbrain 13y ago
Without a location parameter this is pretty useless. Andrea for example is a male name in Spain and Italy as far as I know. Also this: http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-gender/ http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programm...
- slazaro 13y ago
  Andrea is a female name in Spain, unless it's in very specific regions that I don't know of (source: I'm Spanish). I think you're right about Italy, though.
- terabytest 13y ago
  I'm Italian, my name is Gabriele and it classifies it as female. That's wrong. In Italy, Gabriele is a male name. I agree that this is useless without location information.
sambeau 13y ago
The only reliable way to find out someone's gender is to ask them what gender they currently think they are. There are more than two genders and an individual's gender can change with time. A better strategy all-round would to be ask yourself whether you need to know someone's gender. I can think of very few legitimate reasons to know and record a user's gender and many of them can be dealt with by simply asking them what they'd like to be referred as, perhaps in more than one scenario.
- joaomsa 13y ago
  One use I've come across for inferring genders was tackling record depupliction across multiple data sources. In one data set we might have the gender information of an individual but have it be missing in another. Turns out gender is great to include in a blocking keys to reduce number of comparisons. Extrapolating an inferred gender in the dataset without one was incredibly helpful.
  - aw3c2 13y ago
    You are forgetting that the individual might consider the gender to be private information. Some people might want to use a different gender in different contexts. See the ESPN/Grantland suicide issue recently if you care/dare.
    - mseebach 13y ago
      An individual that considers gender to be private information , and that uses different genders in different situations is very unlikely to be using a name that can be classified with a high degree of confidence as one gender. A person using the name "Jack" is unlikely to be assumed to be a woman, even if that person selected "female" from a drop down somewhere. If the same person uses Jack/M and Cindy/F in different contexts, no fuzzy algorithm is going to resolve them as the same person (bar some other, stronger ID, such as a SSN). EDIT: I initially used "William" as an example. Ironically, it turns out that name is only 57.6% male. Both Jack and Cindy are 90% male/female.
blueskin_ 13y ago
I get ~70% for a name I've never even heard of being used for a female.
levlandau 13y ago
Neat. Should probably call out that it's an API for "gender classification of english names". Did you build this mostly for learning/personal purposes?
mastersk3 13y ago
This is great fun, could you embed share options? I could trigger a share-war amongst my friends!
karanbhangui 13y ago
Apparently Karan is female :(
jpsim 13y ago
if probability == "59.369936" { probability = "?" gender = "unknown" }
ozh 13y ago
Fun, although you might want to state it applies to the US only
- abe238 13y ago
  I'm not even sure of that. I have seen much better results from US Census data with very different %'s of prob e.g. http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/gndr/a062944e-744e-4955-b685-f3197faa2560 http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/gndr/a062944e-744e-495...
abe238 13y ago
Bah I much rather use this app as it's much faster: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/gndr/a062944e-744e-4955-b685-f3197faa2560 http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/gndr/a062944e-744e-495...
bnegreve 13y ago
What's the training set?
nl 13y ago
I spend a lot of time choosing gender neutral names for story based scenarios in proposals (the joys of corporate work). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name has been mentioned elsewhere, but I've found it pretty useful. Unlike a lot of people here, I don't think there is anything wrong with an API like this. It's true that it isn't culturally neutral, but there are times when any piece of information is useful.
sheraz 13y ago
I think it is important to make a distinction between gender and sex [1]. The link below is a makes a pretty good distinction between the two. "Sex" refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women. "Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. [1]- http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/ http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/
- Renaud 13y ago
  And even sex[1] is sometimes not as binary as we make it to be. [1]:http://www.chw.org/display/PPF/DocID/22620/Nav/1/router.asp http://www.chw.org/display/PPF/DocID/22620/Nav/1/router.asp

18 points by heynk 13y ago

I started searching for the most gender ambiguous names I could think of like "Jesse", "Alex", "Erin", etc. The best one I've found so far is "Angel" at 51.1% male.

a_bonobo 13y ago
Jessie has exactly 50.0000% :)
wging 13y ago
Jamie does pretty well. 50.24%. Jaime is further from 50%.
dmpatierno 13y ago
How about the worst score for an unambiguous name? I got 56.3% male for "David".
cclogg 13y ago
This is pretty fun lol. I searched for Santa and it said 99% female haha.
- Renaud 13y ago
  Apparently god is overwhelmingly male at 99.998179%
cycrutchfield 13y ago
"Kelly" is 50.16% female, surprisingly
arocks 13y ago
There is an entire Wikipedia page on Unisex names [1]. Most Punjabi Sikh first names are applicable to both genders. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name
code_duck 13y ago
Adrian, 51.067064%

robinjfisher 13y ago

My name has a 50.444139% chance of being female. In the present case, the API is, unfortunately, incorrect.

Dewie 13y ago
My name has 99.99...% chance of being male. But when I change it to the English/Anglophone version, the chance is only 60.641%.

hnriot 13y ago

why bother with a naive bayes classifier, why not just use the dictionary, when it matches the percentage is simple the ratio of the genders? I don't see the need for a classifier, I was hoping it was going to do something clever like guess the gender of a document's author.

bwp 13y ago

Microsoft is unknown, Linux is male, and Apple is female.

blueskin_ 13y ago
BSD is unknown.

shobhitjain26 13y ago

my Name is unknown . http://gender.hankstoever.com/classify/shobhit http://gender.hankstoever.com/classify/shobhit

kirchhoff 13y ago

John - 57.3% ?

ddeck 13y ago
Definitely some odd results: Michael = 52%, Thomas = 62% (although Tom = 98%)
- markcampbell 13y ago
  Thomassina is a woman's name, FWIW.
  - yen223 13y ago
    Thom is 99.999963% male though.
- VolatileVoid 13y ago
  I know a female Michael.
- CatsoCatsoCatso 13y ago
  Yup. 'Eric' (which often becomes Erica for females) scored a 10% higher chance of being male than 'John' did (Eric = 66.854585% while John = 57.399103%). What's also surprising is the dramatic change the Anglicizing of the name brings: 'Erik' = 91.939346% while 'Eric' = 66.854585%
yen223 13y ago
Could it be caused by 'John' being a common last name?

sdegutis 13y ago

"Permelia"[1] is definitely a girl's name[2]. [1]: http://blog.xkcd.com/2014/01/31/the-baby-name-wizard/ http://blog.xkcd.com/2014/01/31/the-baby-name-wizard/ [2]: http://gender.hankstoever.com/classify/Permelia http://gender.hankstoever.com/classify/Permelia

onion2k 13y ago

While it's a quite interesting coding task to write a classifier, for the overwhelming majority of applications you simply don't need to know a user's gender. Making it a public API is a bad thing. Developers have a horrible tendency to gather as much data on someone as possible, everything they're willing to give in fact, for the simple reason of "just in case we need it later". It's far, far better to gather as little as possible and build something that simply doesn't need to know specifics. If we build things that are ambiguous, unspecific for age, gender, race, nationality, etc then the world will be a better and more inclusive place. Paradoxical as it seems, more privacy actually leads to a more integrated society. That is universally a good thing (in my opinion, obv.).

splitbrain 13y ago

Without a location parameter this is pretty useless. Andrea for example is a male name in Spain and Italy as far as I know. Also this: http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-gender/ http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programm...

slazaro 13y ago
Andrea is a female name in Spain, unless it's in very specific regions that I don't know of (source: I'm Spanish). I think you're right about Italy, though.
terabytest 13y ago
I'm Italian, my name is Gabriele and it classifies it as female. That's wrong. In Italy, Gabriele is a male name. I agree that this is useless without location information.

sambeau 13y ago

The only reliable way to find out someone's gender is to ask them what gender they currently think they are. There are more than two genders and an individual's gender can change with time. A better strategy all-round would to be ask yourself whether you need to know someone's gender. I can think of very few legitimate reasons to know and record a user's gender and many of them can be dealt with by simply asking them what they'd like to be referred as, perhaps in more than one scenario.

joaomsa 13y ago
One use I've come across for inferring genders was tackling record depupliction across multiple data sources. In one data set we might have the gender information of an individual but have it be missing in another. Turns out gender is great to include in a blocking keys to reduce number of comparisons. Extrapolating an inferred gender in the dataset without one was incredibly helpful.
- aw3c2 13y ago
  You are forgetting that the individual might consider the gender to be private information. Some people might want to use a different gender in different contexts. See the ESPN/Grantland suicide issue recently if you care/dare.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    An individual that considers gender to be private information , and that uses different genders in different situations is very unlikely to be using a name that can be classified with a high degree of confidence as one gender. A person using the name "Jack" is unlikely to be assumed to be a woman, even if that person selected "female" from a drop down somewhere. If the same person uses Jack/M and Cindy/F in different contexts, no fuzzy algorithm is going to resolve them as the same person (bar some other, stronger ID, such as a SSN). EDIT: I initially used "William" as an example. Ironically, it turns out that name is only 57.6% male. Both Jack and Cindy are 90% male/female.

blueskin_ 13y ago

I get ~70% for a name I've never even heard of being used for a female.

levlandau 13y ago

Neat. Should probably call out that it's an API for "gender classification of english names". Did you build this mostly for learning/personal purposes?

mastersk3 13y ago

This is great fun, could you embed share options? I could trigger a share-war amongst my friends!

karanbhangui 13y ago

Apparently Karan is female :(

jpsim 13y ago

if probability == "59.369936" { probability = "?" gender = "unknown" }

ozh 13y ago

Fun, although you might want to state it applies to the US only

abe238 13y ago
I'm not even sure of that. I have seen much better results from US Census data with very different %'s of prob e.g. http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/gndr/a062944e-744e-4955-b685-f3197faa2560 http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/gndr/a062944e-744e-495...

abe238 13y ago

Bah I much rather use this app as it's much faster: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/gndr/a062944e-744e-4955-b685-f3197faa2560 http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/gndr/a062944e-744e-495...

bnegreve 13y ago

What's the training set?

nl 13y ago

I spend a lot of time choosing gender neutral names for story based scenarios in proposals (the joys of corporate work). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name has been mentioned elsewhere, but I've found it pretty useful. Unlike a lot of people here, I don't think there is anything wrong with an API like this. It's true that it isn't culturally neutral, but there are times when any piece of information is useful.

sheraz 13y ago

I think it is important to make a distinction between gender and sex [1]. The link below is a makes a pretty good distinction between the two. "Sex" refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women. "Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. [1]- http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/ http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/

Renaud 13y ago
And even sex[1] is sometimes not as binary as we make it to be. [1]:http://www.chw.org/display/PPF/DocID/22620/Nav/1/router.asp http://www.chw.org/display/PPF/DocID/22620/Nav/1/router.asp