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

Answer 1

What I would do is make a hack which takes the name and searches it against the facebook api. Then looks at the resulting users and count how many of them are female or male. You then can return a percentage. Not so insurmountable anymore. :)

Answer 2

This is not really a programming problem - it comes down to getting a probability table.

AFAIK there are no public databases in distilled forms. You could either build this from census data, or buy the data from someone.

For example, this is someone who sells the probability table for Canada.

Answer 3

I'm pretty sure no such service could exist with an acceptable level of accuracy. Here are the problems which I think are insurmountable:

• There are plenty of names which are for both men and women.
• There's a lot of different names in this world, even if you only consider one country.
• There is the "A Boy Named Sue" issue, raised so eloquently by Johnny Cash :-)

Answer 4

The gender of a name is something that cannot be inferred programmatically in the general case. You need a name database. Here is a free name database from the US Census Bureau.

EDIT: The link for the 2010 name is dead but there are working links and a libraries in the comments.

Answer 5

Some cultures have unisex names - like mine. What do you do then? I think the answer is plain and simple - don't assume - you could cause offence. Just ask if its needed, otherwise gender neutrality.

Answer 6

I've builded a free API that gives a probabilistic guess on the gender based on a first name. Instead of using any of the above mentioned approaches, i instead use a huge dataset of profiles from social networks to provide a probabilistic guess along with a certainty factor. It also supports optional filtering through country or language id's. It's getting better by the day as more profiles are added to the dataset.

It's free to use at http://genderize.io

ONE thing you should consider is using a tool that takes demographics into account, as naming conventions will rely heavily on this.

Example

http://api.genderize.io?name=kim
{"name":"kim","gender":"female","probability":"0.89","count":1440}

http://api.genderize.io?name=kim&country_id=dk
{"name":"kim","gender":"male","probability":"0.95","count":44,"country_id":"dk"}