• jia_tan@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 months ago

    Genuine question. Why does a program need to know the user’s gender? (I’m asking in general, not in this particular case). Just use gender neutral pronouns to refer to the user, or, better yet, don’t talk to me at all!

    Aside from niche things like targeted ads and gendered health tracking and stuff.

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.social
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    6 months ago

    Gender PHP extension is a port of the gender.c program originally written by Joerg Michael. The main purpose is to find out the gender of firstnames. The current database contains >40000 firstnames from 54 countries.

    For anyone curious but not curious enough to go digging around.

    • T156@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Only slightly though. It hardly seems practical to try and infer gender from names, in a way where it can’t be obtained through historical records, or the user.

      • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        For a given individual, sure. If you’re trying to do some statistics over a whole group that you have no other record for, it could be useful.

        • bss03@infosec.pub
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          6 months ago

          Sounds like those statistics output would the heavily biased by whatever process you were using to turn names into genders. In short, a bad idea.

          • TangledHyphae@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            “Since the dataset isn’t 100% perfectly annotated for analysis, we should give up the whole project entirely.”