2mo ago

PHP: Gender\Gender - Manual

www.php.net

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Gender PHP extension is a port of the gender.c program originally written by Joerg Michael. The main purpose is to find out the gender of firstnames. The current database contains >40000 firstnames from 54 countries.
For anyone curious but not curious enough to go digging around.
If you click around a bit more in that documentation, you can see that that isn't an enumeration of genders, it's an interface for answering the question which gender any given name belongs to. (For example, "Andrea" is understood as exclusively feminine for German speakers, but it's a common male last name in Italy.)
- why on earth would such a weirdly specific thing be an official extension? lol
  
  Apparently, PHP has a low threshold for making something an "official" api
Slightly less stupid than the list of constants would imply.
- Only slightly though. It hardly seems practical to try and infer gender from names, in a way where it can't be obtained through historical records, or the user.
  
  For a given individual, sure. If you're trying to do some statistics over a whole group that you have no other record for, it could be useful.
Yes, my gender is Estonia.
Genuine question. Why does a program need to know the user’s gender? (I’m asking in general, not in this particular case). Just use gender neutral pronouns to refer to the user, or, better yet, don’t talk to me at all!
Aside from niche things like targeted ads and gendered health tracking and stuff.
- For some languages gender-neutral pronouns aren't possible or aren't appropriate. It's really only in English and maybe five other languages that gender-neutral pronouns are a real thing and even in these languages if you're not used to using neutral pronouns or reading them in common writing sounds like a mistake to begin with. It's generally just easier to automate the task based on names, and the library itself comes from a time when that wasn't a controversial thought. Lol
  
  English, Dutch, German, Papiamento, Spanish
  just from the top of my head. That can't be all of them?
- Gender PHP extension is a port of the gender.c program ... The main purpose is to find out the gender of firstnames.
  As of why, you don't need a why in open source. Some people treat gender as a function of their firstname, apparently, and need that information somewhere - maybe for localization, maybe for personalization, maybe for form-filling auto-suggestion purposes.
- HR software in Germany needs to know because we have to send this information to the government. Along with a lot of other information.
Ah, ITALY, my favorite gender
- My favorite is true, but I also like gender 1901.01.01.
  
  what are you talking about?

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