Re: Bug#1014908: ITP: gender-guesser -- Guess the gender from first name

[Edward Betts <edward@4angle.com>]

Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
> edward@4angle.com wrote:
> 
> >Package: wnpp
> >Severity: wishlist
> >Owner: Edward Betts <edward@4angle.com>
> >X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org, debian-python@lists.debian.org
> >
> >* Package name    : gender-guesser
> >  Version         : 0.4.0
> >  Upstream Author : Israel Saeta P�z <israel@lead-ratings.com>
> >* URL             : https://github.com/lead-ratings/gender-guesser
> >* License         : GPL-3 & GFDL-1.2+
> >  Programming Lang: Python
> >  Description     : Guess the gender from first name
> 
> Oh, not *another* package that tries to guess things from names.
> 
> Do you have a real use for this package? There are a *lot* of issues
> in this area, and mis-gendering people is not something to risk
> lightly...

I've been writing some code to work out the gender balance of speakers at a
conference. It parses the pentabarf XML of the schedule and feeds the speaker
names to this module.

Here's the results for Debconf 22.

72 speakers

male              48   66.7%
unknown           16   22.2%
female             4    5.6%
mostly_male        2    2.8%
andy               1    1.4%
mostly_female      1    1.4%

I can add a warning to the package about problems guessing things from names,
or I'm happy to retract the ITP.

-- 
Edward