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Genderize.io determines the gender of a first name

21 points| duvander | 12 years ago |genderize.io

59 comments

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[+] davidu|12 years ago|reply
Pro 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."

[+] tommorris|12 years ago|reply
Yes. 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.

[+] twerquie|12 years ago|reply
I suspect this is more for data analysis than it is for user-facing features.

I hope.

[+] fournm|12 years ago|reply
And in more cases than people seem to think, you really don't need it.
[+] sksksk|12 years ago|reply
It 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}
[+] rajington|12 years ago|reply
http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=joe

{"joe":"male"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jo

{"jo":"female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jamie

{"jamie":"mostly_female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jaime

{"jaime":"andy"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=joan

{"joan":"female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=kelly

{"kelly":"mostly_female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=lucy

{"lucy":"female"}

BONUS: 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

[+] kristopolous|12 years ago|reply
It'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.
[+] NoPiece|12 years ago|reply
For people interested in other tools, there is a command line gender verification tool and database:

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

[+] rajington|12 years ago|reply 

  http://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

[+] rmc|12 years ago|reply
A "command line gender verification tool"? So it'll verify my gender based from the command line? :P
[+] mickeyp|12 years ago|reply
Interesting, 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.
[+] ds9|12 years ago|reply
On my first try I got an erroneous result on a non-Anglo name: 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.

[+] nollidge|12 years ago|reply
Other 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.
[+] rajington|12 years ago|reply
It 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

Hosted on heroku's free tier here are some more interesting examples:

Basic: http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=peter

  {"peter":"male"}
"Mostly" Response: http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Jamie

  {"Jamie":"mostly_female"}
Country (helps with guesses, default USA): http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=Jamie&country=great_br...

  {"Jamie":"mostly_male"}
[+] klous|12 years ago|reply
I'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
[+] ronaldx|12 years ago|reply
I would be impressed by that!
[+] Stromgren|12 years ago|reply
Hello.

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 :)

[+] appsappsapps|12 years ago|reply
First 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...
[+] brohee|12 years ago|reply
Completely 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.

[+] geuis|12 years ago|reply
As Elizabeth or Leslie are common male names in the UK but female in the US.

I appreciate the authors effort, but don't see much use.

[+] azurelogic|12 years ago|reply
It 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.
[+] iamds|12 years ago|reply
I 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 to see the full stats.
[+] erehweb|12 years ago|reply
Worked 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.
[+] swengw|12 years ago|reply
If 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