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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

#41

Post by icambron »

regis wrote: post #31

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 sid…

I think you're looking at this through too narrow a use case. I agree you shouldn't be taking individual people and guessing what their genders are. And you should minimize the instances where gender is even relevant in your application.

But what if you have a whole bunch of data and want to do some aggregate statistics? "Do women use our product?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask yourself. You don't need it to be exact, and it's certainly not reasonable to ask every user. So you use some heuristics and you get some useful data.

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

#42

Post by obviouslygreen »

lkrubner wrote: post #35

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.

Of course you're technically right, but the pedantry is out of control. In reality, when speaking English in a professional (and pretty much any other) setting, "sex" means "gender."

I don't think it's worth repeating. I'd say it's repeating this kind of misplaced vernacular revisionism that's making us (in which I controversially refer to the disparate collection of users on HN as a single group) look even more anal and oversensitive than we actually are.

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

#43

Post by regis »

icambron wrote: post #41
regis wrote: post #31

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 sid…

I think you're looking at this through too narrow a use case. I agree you shouldn't be taking individual people and guessing what their genders are. And you should minimize the instances where gender is even relevant in your application. But what if you have a whole bunch of data and want to do some aggregate statistics? "Do women use our product?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask yourself. You don't need it…

I agree I'm mainly concerned about cases where gender follows you around a website when you're logged in.

"Good Morning Mr. _" and stuff like that should be avoided unless supplied by the user. For your own stats using this library is probably better than asking users for that information.

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

#44

Post by tttp »

regis wrote: post #31

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 sid…

In quite a few languages, you need to know the gender to write personalised emails, eg. Cher Joe vs. Chère Jane.

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

#45

Post by jules »

chimeracoder wrote: post #19
heelhook wrote: post #8

Shouldn't this be called "Gender Machine", they get it right on the project description but not on the project name, weird.

On the one hand, gender corresponds to identification and behavior, which this predicts (more so than biology). On the other hand, this produces binary output[0], and sex is more generally accepted to be binary than gender. So, I think 'sex machine' is appropriate. [0] Okay, three options, but 'andy' really corresponds to 'unknown', not 'person of androgynous gender'.

Sex isn't binary as binary as you'd think. There are people with ambiguous genitals, so that doesn't work. There are people with genitals that don't match the sex of the rest of their body. Genes then? There are people that have male genes and female bodies, and vice versa. There are people with both male and female genes (XXY).

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

#46

Post by ldh »

tttp wrote: post #44
regis wrote: post #31

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 sid…

In quite a few languages, you need to know the gender to write personalised emails, eg. Cher Joe vs. Chère Jane.

That's a pretty poor definition of "personalised". When people get canned emails which guess their gender incorrectly it just seems a bit sleazy.

"Hi, you don't know me but I want your money."

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

#48

Post by nickzoic »

MartinCron wrote: post #6
api wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its probably useful for aggregate statistics. The Jordans and Teagans and Pats are outliers.

As are the Leslies, Shannons, Ashleys, and Tracys. That makes me think, if you had firstname + birthdate, you could probably be a tiny bit more accurate.

first name, birthdate, country/region code to allow for regional variations.

Would make a nice exercise in fuzzy decision processes, but I suspect it isn't a great idea: you'd be better off leaving that field as "unknown" by default and writing "Dear Sir/Madam" if it is unknown.

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

#49

Post by jordibunster »

obviouslygreen wrote: post #42
lkrubner wrote: post #35

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.

Of course you're technically right, but the pedantry is out of control. In reality, when speaking English in a professional (and pretty much any other) setting, "sex" means "gender." I don't think it's worth repeating. I'd say it's repeating this kind of misplaced vernacular revisionism that's making us (in which I controversially refer to the disparate collection of users on HN as a single group) look even more anal…

When you say things like "updated his profile" in your app, you're talking about individuals, often times to them. Those people have feelings, regardless of how "professional" the context is.

So don't assume anything unless you want to exclude people who don't fit in that binary box. It's not about being pedantic, it's about being considerate.

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

#50

Post by ig1 »

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…

Can you get probabilities out ?
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