Male or Female Name Recognition

Is there any way Fusion Pro could look at the first name of an entrey and determin if the person is a boy or girl? Or would i have to find separate software to do that. It would be easier if i had the field "Sex" in the database with "M" or "F" but i don't so i am trying to solve this differently.

 

Thanks Guys

I don't know of any way to do this without a haveing a database mapping every possible first name to a gender, and even then there's no guarantee that you'd get it right in every case. Can you tell just by looking at a name like Pat or Terry if the person is male or female? What about names from other (non-English) cultures? I don't see how any third-party software would be able to solve this problem in any comprehensive way either.

 

If you don't actually have a field specifying gender, my advice is to rework your job to not depend on anything gender-specific. For instance, instead of starting out a letter with Mr. or Ms., just start with "Dear <<firstname>>", or some other salutation. It might be easier to offer more specific suggestions if I had a better idea about what you're ultimately trying to accomplish.

Jordan,

 

This is a slippery slope that I would recommend avoiding if at all possible. There have been VDP horror stories (none of our customers, of course!) of templates that had rules that assumed gender incorrectly and resulted in some very negative customer feedback, as I'm sure you can imagine.

 

The name "Pat" is a classic example of one that cannot be assumed to be Male or Female. An old SNL skit might come to mind....

 

Other cases include foreign names that the rule writer is not familiar with and first names that are just initials "J. Lopez" (that might be Johnny Lopez - no relation to J.Lo).

 

On top of this, the rule to lookup every name and assign a gender to it would be huge. There's hundreds of thousands (??) of possibilities you would have to match. Rule processing would not be speedy....

 

Disclaimer aside, a partially useful rule might take into account the 100 or so most popular male and female names and do a lookup on those. Names outside of this would need to be given a gender neutral response, though.

 

A better solution would be to work with a company like AccuData who provides some great services including data enhancement where they can append additional information to your lists such as gender. Take a look at their site if interested:

 

http://www.accudata.com/dsg/data-enhancement.aspx

Whoa. I swear Dan and I didn't compare notes on this before replying!

If you want to try it out anyway, there is a free gender tagger available here: http://www.semaphorecorp.com

 

It's not the most user friendly piece of software. I've tried it just for fun and it does a reasonable job on english names, but foreign ones are questionable.

I have used Splitter (http://www.infoplan.com.au/splitter/) in a pinch, not for genderizing, but for splitting first/middle/last names. It does provide genderizing, but don't know if the 2-tier confidence level tagging applies to that or just the name split. Oh, and it only works for MS Access.

 

As mentioned in other posts, don't expect a 100% accuracy of gender assignment...

 

-Joe

We use a program called Personator which does an excellent job. It will code your database with an M, F, N or blank. Then you can create a rule for Male, Female, Neutral or not defined to create your personalized pieces. The company was purchased a while ago but I think you can find the software at Melissa Data.

BCC MM2010 also has a feature to code with a M, F, or N based on a given database. It is something we steer clear from, but we are aware of the capability.