It’s really great that I could actually retain this idea even after conceiving it like 2 weeks ago.

Ok the inspiration for this idea came from my Professor’s question. She came into the lab and pronounced an Indian name as best as she could. I did get what she was trying to say (so she was good).

She had received a resume for application towards a post. And, as is the case nowadays, it was from an Indian. She didn’t know what the particular applicants’ gender was. So she asked me.

So?

She did address me as Ms.B… at the very beginning of our conversation about my job. So I know how it is. And this happened before too, and I was in a similar predicament of addressing a potential HR manager whose name was given, and I had to choose between, Mr. or Ms. I went for the tested but unsafe Dear Sir/Ma’am, in cases where even Google couldn't help me.

Anyway, so the idea is a website which basically searches from a database, what gender a given (user entered name) name is. Simple. Right?

Then, I thought, how am I going to compose such a database. Well, for one, all you need to do is ask (mass-mail) your friends and their friends, and their, to go to the site and enter their name, and the gender (as one of my friends tried to do with her surveys).

Hmmm, fair enough. What makes you think there won’t be spoil-sports? Well, this is where another idea fits in.

What my end of work would be is to compile the list of names, and to analyze the repeats. This works on the principle that not everybody is an a**hole to spoil the database. So when a user enters the name, and searches for it, there will be a statistic showing how many in database have been marked as male or female by the contributors. Simple.

So that leaves the decision to our hapless global user who wants to know whether “Anantaraman Lakshmi Narsimha” is to be addressed as Mr. or Ms.

If you actually noticed, the example in itself presents a new problem. Names that involve multiple words of possible different genders. What do we do in that case.

Well, I haven’t thought about it my shower yet. But I guess now I have things to wonder about while showering.

Any suggestions and eager-beavers are welcome with their comments. Please help.

 

Oh by the way, if anyone knows that there is already a site that covers this issue, let me know. I really, honestly, didn’t do my research.

 

EDIT: http://www.gpeters.com/names/baby-names.php

Free database for finding genders. There are couple of paid ones and one site where I encountered some error.