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Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

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Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#31

Post by regis »

Frankly, it is none of your business what the sex or gender of a user is. I understand that sometimes there is money to be made by collecting this information but it is also alienating and just plain irrelevant (and I think there is also money to be made in recognizing that people can be fluid.)

You can give your users an option to provide you with these details but guessing/requiring is not a good practice.

On a side note, it's interesting that the most common gender neutral title is Dr.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#32

Post by _pius »

I submitted this, but I'm not the author of the library.

I agree with many of the concerns and limitations brought up here, most notably the fluid, non-binary nature of gender. That said, thoughtful application of probabilistic guesses about gender can add value in certain situations. For instance: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/learning/freeing-plu...

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#33

Post by dclowd9901 »

We tried to solve a similar problem with our app, too. We were trying to generate questions based on person and occasion (think: "What should I get my boyfriend for his birthday).

It got interesting when occasions didn't warrant possessives ("What should I get my boyfriend for Christmas"), and when language factors were considered ("What should I get mi abuelo for su cumpleanos"). We decided to try and crowd source it, which worked ok: essentially we left the occasion empty, and if the person wanted to attach the gender-based possessive to it, they could. Otherwise, we would guess with what information we had. We figured, over time, we could actually create a service where we could sell that information (GaaS: Grammar as a service?).

Turns out, people just wanted to be able to write their own titles, and we quickly trashed the idea in the early phases.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#34

Post by binarysoul »

nostromo wrote: post #22
te_platt wrote: post #3

As a man named Tracy I would just throw out a caution to anyone thinking of using this. At this point in my life I don't really care about people calling Ms. Tracy Platt. But what it does do is immediately signal that I don't really need to pay attention. Fake familiarity doesn't usually work too well. As a side note I would like to mention that having a girl's name does have some benefits. For example my wife can ha…

Me and my significant other frequently impersonate each other when dealing with banks and hospitals over the phone (we're a gay couple). It honestly never occurred to me that straight folks can't get away with this. How unfortunate; it's quite a time saver!

my experience is that the person on the phone usually doesn't care if you have all the relevant info

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#35

Post by lkrubner »

I know that most of us already know this, but it is worth repeating: sex is biological, gender is cultural (for instance, "la montaña" - the mountain is feminine in the Spanish language). A "sex machine" would tell you whether you were dealing with a biological male or biological female, or something else, but it would not tell you the gender.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#36

Post by obviouslygreen »

Haha, wow. It's like someone said, "Hey, what are people reacting incredibly poorly to right now?", then took the answer, and built an almost-useful library with a funny but obviously-destined-to-offend-lots-of-people name.

Really though, geek PC hilarity aside... with so many collisions and uncertainties, this just isn't a practical approach.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#37

Post by chrislloyd »

chriseppstein wrote: post #18

Gender identity is actually a quite tricky topic and should be approached carefully. I would discourage anyone from trying to use this library, the real world doesn't fit neatly in your multiple-choice view of gender. For more information, please watch this great talk: http://vimeo.com/61172068 .

I checked how Facebook handles gender the other day and it's still either "Male" or "Female". Strange, because they return gender as a string in API calls.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#39

Post by tingletech »

mbell wrote: post #17
ig1 wrote: post #2

Without knowing what data it's been trained on it's of questionable use. What maybe a 18 year old american girls name may be a 60 year old german mans name. The gender of a name can vary heavily by culture and time-period, it would make much more sense for the api to return the data in the form of ranked probabilities. As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you can't use this code in any…

> Without knowing what data it's been trained on it's of questionable use. Literally the very first line of the README has a link to the source data. It contains name frequency data for a number of countries and the README clearly indicates you can provide a country of origin when doing lookups. > As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you can't use this code in any non-GPL product. The s…

The data is GPL documentation license; why/how would that affect the code?
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