Does anyone know of a good library for mapping a person's name to his or her gender? [closed]

Answer 1

It's also poor practice to assume that users must be male or female. There are a small but significant number of "intersex" people, most of whom are heartily sick of not having a box to tick..
bignose: interesting on the "singular they". I didn't realize it had such a long history.

Answer 2

Well, not anymore. IBM patented that idea a while ago.

So if you're looking for any level of flexability (something other than a list of names), you'll either have to (gasp!) ask the user, or simply pay IBM for the rights :)

In any case, such autodetection is annoying for many people who have gender-ambiguous names, or even just mean parents. Let's not make this any harder for them.

Answer 3

Here are two oddball approaches that may not even work, and likely wouldn't work en masse without violating the terms of a license:

1. Use the Facebook API (which I know virtually nothing about, it may not even be possible) to perform two searches: one for FB male users with that first name, and one for female. Use the two numbers to decide the probability of gender.

2. Much looser but more scalable, use the Google API and search for the name plus the gender-specific pronouns, and compare the numbers. For instance, there are 592,000,000 results for searching for "Richard his" (not as a phrase), but only 179,000,000 for "Richard her".

Answer 4

Check out http://genderchecker.com/

Answer 5

Got this from hacker news discussion about this

Answer 6

It's not a service, but a little app with a database:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/genderizer.aspx

And this tool is in german:
http://www.faq-o-matic.net/2011/06/01/zu-einem-vornamen-das-geschlecht-finden/

And another one in VB:
http://www.vbarchiv.net/tipps/tipp_1925-geschlecht-anhand-des-vornamens-ermitteln.html

I think in combination with some "Most used firstname in 2011" lists you should be able to build something decent.