RE: Determine gender from first name

All depends on how many users you have and how accurate you want your data to be. If your language uses specific morphemes for women (usually non-european languages have marked feminine morphemes; male names and pronouns are not marked), then you could write a parser for these names. Yet I doubt your data will be any better than 90% accurate. Don't forget people construct virtual identities and often use loanwords. You could also parse their content (blogs, comments,... *is this legal?) and see which first person pronouns, verbs, etc. they use. If the latter are explicit feminine forms, use a feminine welcome.

So, I would just work around the gender-specific welcome. Replace it somehow. Convince your client it is somehow spooky to directly address the visitor.

Or, even better, add a gender category to your db and register form and convince your client that some day it will prove interesting for data mining purposes.

greetings,

djinja

> Subject: Re: Determine gender from first name
> From: lawgon@thenilgiris.com
> To: django-users@googlegroups.com
> Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:20:36 +0530
>
> On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 09:49 +0100, Demetrio Girardi wrote:
> > How can I go about this? Is there a publicly available database of
> > first names divided by language and gender? A public web-service that
> > guesstimates the gender?
>
> not possible in my opinion. There may be some languages where a name
> *has* to have gender specific suffix. All the languages I know do not.
> Maria, Rama, Krishna, for example are not gender specific.
> --
> regards
> Kenneth Gonsalves
>
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