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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

It's determining sex, not gender. Sex is a binary physical attribute (plus some edge cases); gender is a much more fluid aspect of who we are. By writing code that puts people in to only "male" or "female" and ignoring everything else that people identify with you're disenfranchising a lot of people.

This is definitely some interesting work, but I really would recommend not using it in the real world. You almost certainly don't need to know a user's gender; if you really do then you should ask them what it is and use their own definition.

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He said determine gender of a name, not of a person. Names (as part of the speech, not as people identifiers) have genders, grammar says so. Then one can argue that 80% accuracy is not that much, but as first approach to machine learning is actually an interesting choice

A name can have multiple genders, for example Kim is male and female

> Names (as part of the speech, not as people identifiers) have genders, grammar says so.

You'd have to be speaking a language with gender marked on the noun; English is not such a language.

blond/blonde

actor/actress

fiancé/fiancée

widower/widow

waiter/waitress

None of those are nouns with grammatical gender (semantic gender, yes. Grammatical gender, no). English is not such a language. Our pronouns are marked for gender; our nouns, including names, aren't.

It's worth observing, as a fun fact, that English obeys a grammatical gender system which is not masculine/feminine:

in modern American English, "who" is a pronoun for people (and anything being granted a sort of honorary personhood, like a pet), and "what" is a pronoun for non-people. The third-person pronouns follow the same distinction, with "it" being marked for nonpersonhood. This is a change from historical usage, and is why e.g. some people today will be offended by another person referring to their baby as "it".

There is very strong correlation between sex and gender ;-)

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gender

Seems that gender can be used both ways.

I wish English made it easier to just use gender neutral speech when referring to individuals. The fact that the third-person neutral pronoun is "it", which in English generally carries a negative connotation when applied to an individual, makes the whole situation kind of tricky. I don't imagine someone would be pleased to be referred to as "it", and I wouldn't enjoy using it if I knew it was making someone uncomfortable, or worse, upset.

Third person gender neutral pronoun in English is the singular "they", and has been for literally centuries. Don't let prescriptivists tell you otherwise.

It places the lotion in the basket. Yup, uncomfortable.

Isn't it the other way around? The name (birthname or assumed) reflects a person's social identity and thus is related primarily to their gender. It is only indirectly correlated to their sex (biological makeup), which you cannot directly infer from the name they specify. So I'd say this guesses a person's gender.

Somewhat orthogonal is the issue that the guess is binary (m/f). But the thing is, as long as the accurracy is ~80%, the total mismatch rate is much larger than the rate of people that are mismatched because there is no category for them.

Obviously, you shouldn't guess someone's sex and or gender and present it to them or others. But this can be used for a lot of other things:

- If you have a large dataset of names and other information, but no gender info, and want to see if e.g. women are underrepresented. Even with a weak classifier, you can set bounds.

- If you have a real-name, real-data policy, you can use this as a pre-screening to see if the information entered is plausible. It's of course up to you to then do something responsible with that information. I'd prefer to allow pseudonyms or assumed identites in most cases, but sometimes it's not possible (e.g. if this is a egovernment or insurance project).

>If you have a real-name, real-data policy, you can use this as a pre-screening to see if the information entered is plausible.

If people want to lie, they are going to give you a fake gender to match their fake name. What you're suggesting would flag 20% of your legitimate users and 0% of malicious users.

Approximately 99% of biologically male people identify with a (predominantly) male gender identity, and approximately 99% of biologically female people identify with a (predominantly) female gender identity. Of the remainder, approximately 99% identify as the opposite gender (born male, identifying female, or vice versa). Those people will usually prefer change their name to reflect their gender.

Unless you are specifically targeting liberal arts college students or Tumblr's otherkin community, Gender: Male/Female is going to cover the vast majority of your users. Unless you are running an adult dating website, there's no reason to ask your users' biological sex ever.

All that being said, I do agree that if you want to know a user's gender you should be asking them rather than trying to guess. And since it doesn't cost anything extra you might as well throw "other" in there as an option.

I would think it shouldn't be used in the real world because an 80% guess rate of gender based on name is really terrible compared to other naive approaches, like "list of 1000 most common names by gender".

The point still stands though - guessing a user's gender based on their name whatever solution you use will get it wrong every time the user doesn't identify with the normative gender for that given name. It's much more user friendly to ask (and include an option for "Prefer not to say").

Serious question: How can a name have a biological sex? (Wouldn't the fact that penis-people and vagina-people could be named Amy, but society heavily biases towards one, imply names are indicators of societal genders and not biological sex?)

I agree with your above points about the dangers of making guesses on gender. I'm just not well versed in the progressive gender concepts and don't understand the semantics you are arguing for.

I think that by 'biological sex' they are saying it is identifying the gender of the person as it was assigned to them at birth, which is usually based on visible biological sex characteristics.

No one is suggesting this should be done in actual production software - even the author says it's just "an easy project to learn machine learning".

I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but it's kind of a straw man argument.

> get it wrong every time the user doesn't identify with the normative gender for that given name

While I'm not really buying your root argument, this statement is spot on.

Case in point - I'm a man named Lyndsy.

80% is not very good for practical uses (the Gender Classification as a Service on the web most likely use a map of names to probability of gender), but I think it is very good for 3 features.

Well, why is that constraint interesting?

This is interesting because using only last 2 letters of a name and the position of a's, and throwing away all the other information, you can guess the gender of a name with 80% accuracy.

That's really just restating what you did, not explaining why it's interesting to have done it. Is three features a common limitation of systems? Is this useful in a way that augments existing tools like comparing the name to the SSN database? There is definitely a place for articles saying "this is a toy problem you can use technique x on" but it's worth differentiating that from "this is a novel technique/a discovery made using this technique", and it feels a little like you've done the first kind and you're trying to label it as the second kind.

usually in forms the gender is irrelevant, what matters most of the time (if it even matters) is the sex

If you're gathering sex:

i) you want to know how a person identifies

ii) you're gathering demographic data so you also want to get trans status

At this point there's no point asking about gender. Certainly in the UK asking for sex and then asking for gender is going to be seen as hostile to trans people, while asking for what sex someone identifies as and then asking about trans status is seen as less hostile.

I can't think of a situation where you'd ask for the sex and not for trans status.

Considering the vast majority of people are not trans, then I think that in most situations it would be perfectly acceptable only to ask the sex.

In my field, there is mandatory radiation protection for pregnant women. If you start, you want to ask on the form for the (biological, birth) sex, and if it is not female you can simply skip the part where you inform the worker about rights and responsibilities in case of pregnancies.

Honestly, I don't think you need to ask for any (gender|sex)-information in most cases, but it is often added out of completism. The only valid reasons are: - Self-presentation of the user, e.g. in a profile page -> allow the user to write whatever they want - Advertising, argh, but you often can't get around this. I don't know if advertisers care about how people identify or about trans people, but they probably want a simple m/f flag that fits enough people. - Medical or legal stuff

Blah blah blah, go back to liberal arts college

Please don't do this here.

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