Gender Detector

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")
# => :andy

The result will be one of :andy (androgynous), :male, :female, :mostly_male, or :mostly_female. Any unknown names are considered andies.

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.