The only reliable way to find out someone's gender is to ask them what gender they currently think they are. There are more than two genders and an individual's gender can change with time.<p>A better strategy all-round would to be ask yourself whether you need to know someone's gender. I can think of very few legitimate reasons to know and record a user's gender and many of them can be dealt with by simply asking them what they'd like to be referred as, perhaps in more than one scenario.
While it's a quite interesting coding task to write a classifier, for the overwhelming majority of applications you simply don't need to know a user's gender. Making it a public API is a bad thing.<p>Developers have a horrible tendency to gather as much data on someone as possible, everything they're willing to give in fact, for the simple reason of "just in case we need it later". It's far, <i>far</i> better to gather as little as possible and build something that simply doesn't need to know specifics. If we build things that are ambiguous, unspecific for age, gender, race, nationality, etc then the world will be a better and more inclusive place. Paradoxical as it seems, more privacy actually leads to a more integrated society. That is universally a good thing (in my opinion, obv.).
Without a location parameter this is pretty useless. Andrea for example is a male name in Spain and Italy as far as I know.<p>Also this: <a href="http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-gender/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programm...</a>
I started searching for the most gender ambiguous names I could think of like "Jesse", "Alex", "Erin", etc. The best one I've found so far is "Angel" at 51.1% male.
I think it is important to make a distinction between gender and sex [1]. The link below is a makes a pretty good distinction between the two.<p>"Sex" refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women.<p>"Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.<p>[1]- <a href="http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/" rel="nofollow">http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/</a>
why bother with a naive bayes classifier, why not just use the dictionary, when it matches the percentage is simple the ratio of the genders? I don't see the need for a classifier, I was hoping it was going to do something clever like guess the gender of a document's author.
Neat. Should probably call out that it's an API for "gender classification of english names". Did you build this mostly for learning/personal purposes?
I spend a lot of time choosing gender neutral names for story based scenarios in proposals (the joys of corporate work).<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name</a> has been mentioned elsewhere, but I've found it pretty useful.<p>Unlike a lot of people here, I don't think there is anything wrong with an API like this. It's true that it isn't culturally neutral, but there are times when any piece of information is useful.
Bah I much rather use this app as it's much faster: <a href="http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/gndr/a062944e-744e-4955-b685-f3197faa2560" rel="nofollow">http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/gndr/a062944e-744e-495...</a>
my Name is unknown . <a href="http://gender.hankstoever.com/classify/shobhit" rel="nofollow">http://gender.hankstoever.com/classify/shobhit</a>