
Jane, John, Leslie? A Historical Method for Algorithmic Gender Prediction - benbreen
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/3/000223/000223.html
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brian-armstrong
Surprising to see such a long article that doesn't touch on the modern issues
surrounding gender.

You're much better off just letting the user tell you which gender they prefer
to be identified by. This is such a personal issue, and so key to one's
identity, that having the computer guess is just a bad idea.

edit: As icebraining pointed out, the article does address this point.

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pythia__
>having the computer guess is just a bad idea

Not necessarily. If you approach this strictly from a business perspective as
a commercial software developer, statistical guesses (not just about gender)
that, for example, delight 70% of your users at the price of upsetting 3% can
be worth it.

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brian-armstrong
Although I think your post is also wrong on an ethical level, which would
supercede any business arguments, I'll engage the one you've presented anyway.

Upsetting users by misgendering them won't just upset those users, it also has
the potential to upset their friends and family. You're not just upsetting
them, you're upsetting their network. That 3% starts to look a lot bigger.

And if we consider market trends, facebook actually expanded their gender
identifying process, rather than simplifying it. Facebook has probably more
data than any other entity for the purposes of guessing, and yet they chose to
allow users to self-identify anyway. That would suggest it's not a business-
correct decision.

~~~
pythia__
>I think your post is also wrong on an ethical level

Do you actually mean the argument in the post or the post itself for
presenting it?

>You're not just upsetting them, you're upsetting their network.

Right, this would be a valid concern to an amoral profit maximizer. It would
have to be balanced against the potential profits from bad publicity and, more
deviously, the benefits of a good "redemption story" of changing the
functionality at the upset users' request.

As for Facebook, it is an activist business with the power to shape social
trends, so it is hard draw conclusions from its particular case.

~~~
thescribe
I'm curious if Facebook cares about the long list gender box for advertising
and demographic purposes. I cynically expect them to not trust what you fill
in there.

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Jun8
Interesting. It would be useful I think if somebody implemented a gender
predictor for Chinese first names, which is difficult:
[http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/316/is-there-a-
ru...](http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/316/is-there-a-rule-of-
thumb-for-distinguishing-male-and-female-names-in-chinese). Also the set of
Chinese first names is much larger than for any given Western country.

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gumby
My favorite is "Anne" \-- unambiguously female, but originally male, even so a
couple of hundred years ago.

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Camillo
I would be far more interested in an explanation of why women are stealing all
male names [1] in the first place.

Hypothesis 1: toxic patriarchy devalues everything associated with women, who
are forced to resort to male names once all female names are considered
worthless.

Hypothesis 2: rapacious women feel entitled to everything that is men's, so
taking over their names fits an established pattern.

(Just to get the stupid ideas out of the way.)

[1:
[http://everything2.com/title/Women+are+gradually+stealing+al...](http://everything2.com/title/Women+are+gradually+stealing+all+male+names)]

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petecox
Madison - the authors seem keenly unaware of Tom Hanks' mermaid fetish.

