A better approach to determining gender from a first name
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: A better approach to determining gender from a first name
#2The "probability" return value appears to be a straight average; it returns 1 for "Peter", which is almost guaranteed to be incorrect - all it takes is a single female Peter, anywhere on the planet.
A better approach, in the absence of more complex models, would be to use Laplace's sunrise formula.
Re: A better approach to determining gender from a first name
#3Please just don't.
There is no point antagonising people by guessing information about them wrongly - particularly if it's something they've become sensitised to by it occurring frequently.
If you need to know someone's gender (and largely, you don't), then ask them.
Re: A better approach to determining gender from a first name
#4I'm sure this is interesting from a statistical point of view, but does the tech scene really need yet more reinforcement of a binary view of gender?
Re: A better approach to determining gender from a first name
#5Please just don't. There is no point antagonising people by guessing information about them wrongly - particularly if it's something they've become sensitised to by it occurring frequently. If you need to know someone's gender (and largely, you don't), then ask them.
This. A thousand times this.
Re: A better approach to determining gender from a first name
#6Please just don't. There is no point antagonising people by guessing information about them wrongly - particularly if it's something they've become sensitised to by it occurring frequently. If you need to know someone's gender (and largely, you don't), then ask them.
Think outside the box. This has many other use cases.
Re: A better approach to determining gender from a first name
#7Interesting from a machine-learning perspective - but this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem.
If any service needs to know gender (and I'm having a hard time thinking of times you NEED to know gender - dating sites?) - why not just ask? surely in a situation where you're reliant on having accurate gender information, guessing from $firstname and getting it wrong is worse than asking.
Re: A better approach to determining gender from a first name
#8Interesting from a machine-learning perspective - but this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem. If any service needs to know gender (and I'm having a hard time thinking of times you NEED to know gender - dating sites?) - why not just ask? surely in a situation where you're reliant on having accurate gender information, guessing from $firstname and getting it wrong is worse than asking.
Why not just ask? More form fields means less conversions. Using the service one can ask for the gender later during the registration process only if confidence in the sex detection is lower then a defined threshold.
Re: A better approach to determining gender from a first name
#9Please just don't. There is no point antagonising people by guessing information about them wrongly - particularly if it's something they've become sensitised to by it occurring frequently. If you need to know someone's gender (and largely, you don't), then ask them.
It certainly doesn't have to be user facing. Gender may be used to make user behavior modeling or prediction more accurate.
Re: A better approach to determining gender from a first name
#10Please just don't. There is no point antagonising people by guessing information about them wrongly - particularly if it's something they've become sensitised to by it occurring frequently. If you need to know someone's gender (and largely, you don't), then ask them.
It certainly doesn't have to be user facing. Gender may be used to make user behavior modeling or prediction more accurate.
Fair point. For aggregate statistical analysis this may well be useful.