Gender Detector is a Ruby library that will tell you the most likely gender of a person based on first name. It uses the underlying data from the program “gender” by Jorg Michael (described here).
Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:
gem 'gender_detector'
And then execute:
$ bundle
Or install it yourself as:
$ gem install gender_detector
Its use is pretty straightforward:
>> require 'gender_detector'
>> d = GenderDetector.new
>> d.get_gender("Bob")
:male
>> d.get_gender("Sally")
:female
>> d.get_gender("Pauley") # should be androgynous
:andy
The result will be one of andy (androgynous), male, female, mostly_male, or mostly_female. Any unknown names are considered andies.
I18N is supported if either UnicodeUtils or ActiveSupport are present. To get I18n support, add either one to your Gemfile:
gem 'unicode_utils' # or gem 'activesupport'
Afterwards, gender detection will work for names with non-ASCII characters as well:
>> d.get_gender("Álfrún")
:female
Additionally, you can give preference to specific countries:
>> d.get_gender("Jamie")
=> :female
>> d.get_gender("Jamie", :great_britain)
=> :mostly_male
If you have an alterative data file, you can pass that in as an optional filename argument to the GenderDetector. Additionally, you can create a detector that is not case sensitive (default is to be case sensitive):
>> d = GenderDetector.new(:case_sensitive => false) >> d.get_gender "sally" => :female >> d.get_gender "Sally" => :female
Try to avoid creating many GenderDetectors, as each creation means reading in the data file.
The gender_detector code is distributed under the GPLv3. The data file nam_dict.txt is released under the GNU Free Documentation License.