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

Answer 1

Name-gender maps can work but in multicultural countries it's more like guessing. I can give you one example: Marian in Polish is a typical masculine name, whereas the same name in Great Britain is a female name. In the era of people immigrating all over the world, I'm not sure such database would be very accurate. Good luck!

Answer 2

"I tell ya, life ain't easy for a boy named 'Sue.'"

...So, why make it any harder? If you need to know the sex, just ask... Otherwise, don't worry about it.

Answer 3

I know of no such service, however ..

• you could start with a raw list of person names or
• guess gender according to some rules (e.g. -o => male, -ela, -a => female)

In some countries (e.g. germany) the name a person can be given is limited by law - maybe there are some publications concerning that matter, which could be harvested (but I don't know of any in the moment).

Answer 4

It's culture/region dependent: take Andrea, for Italians is only masculine, for Sweden is a female name while Andreas is for men; Shawn is ambiguous in English. If a language has declination, like Latin or Russian, the final letters will change according to grammatical rules,

Another source of ambiguities is Family names identical to Personal names.

In my opinion it's impossibile to solve in general.

Answer 5

Just ask people, and if they are nice they will give you their 'M's or 'F's , and if they are not then give'em an 'A' .

Answer 6

Given your stated constraints, your best option is to re-phrase whatever it is you're writing to be gender-neutral unless you know what gender they want to be called in each instance.

If writing in English, remember that singular “they” is grammatically fine as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun.

A good example is the title of this question. As is currently:

    … mapping a person's name to his or her sex?

That would be less awkward if written:

    … mapping a person's name to their sex?