If you've got someone's first name, it's possible to make a pretty accurate guess what their gender is. Obviously there's plenty of exceptions, Sean and Francis spring to mind, but for lots of applications you don't need 100% accuracy or coverage. In my case I want a better understanding the demographics of my users, so a figure that's within a few percent is fine.
There's a great Perl module called Text::GenderFromName that implements this idea, with accumulated wisdom dating all the way back to a 1991 awk script! I haven't found anything that fits well into my PHP projects though, so I finally bit the bullet and ported that Perl script to PHP. The result is up at
http://web.mailana.com/labs/genderfromname/
and you can get the source at
http://github.com/petewarden/genderfromname
Thanks to Eamon Daly and Jon Orwant for the original code, and apologies for the mechanical translation of Perl code to PHP. It's now painfully non-idiomatic, but it does work!
For best results you should also install the doublemetaphone PHP module, though it will function without it.
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