Please just don't.<p>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.<p>If you need to know someone's gender (and largely, you don't), then ask them.
> {"name":"marijn","gender":"female","probability":"1.00","count":1}<p>Except, of course, that I am male. My name is used for both genders. The thing completely failed on a few other ambiguous names I tried. I'll second AndrewDucker's opinion—just don't.
Interesting from a machine-learning perspective - but this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem.<p>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.
I'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?
The "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.<p>A better approach, in the absence of more complex models, would be to use Laplace's sunrise formula.
In morphologically rich languages (like Russian) the most discriminative feature for detecting gender could be the word shape of last name or middle name, not the first name. So in many languages there is no way to have meaningful gender prediction by analyzing just the first name. Relative gender frequency for the first name is an useful information, but it is just not enough for reliable gender prediction.
I guess it needs a better training DB, it returns {"gender": null} for not-so-common names in languages other than English...<p><a href="http://api.genderize.io/?name=eloi&language_id=ca" rel="nofollow">http://api.genderize.io/?name=eloi&language_id=ca</a><p><a href="http://api.genderize.io/?name=tomeu&language_id=ca" rel="nofollow">http://api.genderize.io/?name=tomeu&language_id=ca</a><p><a href="http://api.genderize.io/?name=rigoberta&language_id=es" rel="nofollow">http://api.genderize.io/?name=rigoberta&language_id=es</a><p><a href="http://api.genderize.io/?name=presentaci%C3%B3n&language_id=es" rel="nofollow">http://api.genderize.io/?name=presentaci%C3%B3n&language_id=...</a><p>Credit for distinguishing between names in languages, though! Joan returns female in English, but male in Catalan.
This project is a fine example of the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" <a href="http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...</a>
Bear in mind that in some languages this problem doesn't exist. In Polish for example, all female names end with an "a". There is not a single exception from that rule, so if you see a name ending with an "a" it is always a female name.
I thought Hackers News had more people speaking more/other languages than english.<p>A lot of complaints, excluding the binary gender complaints, totaly forget about how languages like portuguese / french have male / female differences for nouns and other language constructs.<p>Let´s say I have to build a phrase where I have the user profession like engineer and I don't know upfront, for portuguese male would be "engenheiro" or " engenheira" for female.
It does have a lot of practical uses. And with a big enough training, the decision to use for that user is on your hands.
For Icelandic names, it's easy to identify the gender by looking at the last name. For example Bjarni Benediktsson is definitely male while Katrín Jakobsdóttir is definitely female.<p>Another strategy is to use gender-neutral terms until you find out the gender, as asking directly might be considered rude in some cultures.
I like this from a usability standpoint. Just as some forms auto-fill the city/state based on the zip (and might get it wrong), this enables something similar. And it might get it wrong, but if your mom gave you a girl's name* blame her.<p>It also seems accurate:<p>Pat = about 50/50
David = All man
Jessica = All woman<p>Also, wrt to "binary gender identity" complaints, are we all college freshmen here?<p>* my own name (Nord) sucks and gave a gender of null. Spent my whole life being called Nerd, Nora, etc. I'm not flipping out.