Inferring gender from name: a large scale performance evaluation study

TL;DR

This study systematically evaluates existing name-to-gender inference methods on large datasets and introduces two hybrid approaches that outperform current techniques in accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive performance comparison of existing methods and proposes two novel hybrid approaches that improve inference accuracy.

Findings

Hybrid approaches outperform single methods

Large-scale datasets enable robust evaluation

New methods achieve higher accuracy

Abstract

A person's gender is a crucial piece of information when performing research across a wide range of scientific disciplines, such as medicine, sociology, political science, and economics, to name a few. However, in increasing instances, especially given the proliferation of big data, gender information is not readily available. In such cases researchers need to infer gender from readily available information, primarily from persons' names. While inferring gender from name may raise some ethical questions, the lack of viable alternatives means that researchers have to resort to such approaches when the goal justifies the means - in the majority of such studies the goal is to examine patterns and determinants of gender disparities. The necessity of name-to-gender inference has generated an ever-growing domain of algorithmic approaches and software products. These approaches have been used throughout the world in academia, industry, governmental and non-governmental organizations. Nevertheless, the existing approaches have yet to be systematically evaluated and compared, making it challenging to determine the optimal approach for future research. In this work, we conducted a large scale performance evaluation of existing approaches for name-to-gender inference. Analysis are performed using a variety of large annotated datasets of names. We further propose two new hybrid approaches that achieve better performance than any single existing approach.