Predict Gender from a Name
The Gender API allows you to predict the gender of a person from the name alone. It uses its own database of previously known names and genders (it seems to have a fixed number of samples per name), and will return the probability that the name is either male or female. For example, if you input elizabeth, it will output 100% certainty the gender is female. Put in a more ambigious name like pat and you’ll get closer to a 50/50 split, where the API is unsure of the gender.
Knowing this information can be helpful for target audience analysis. E.g. you could scrape all of the Twitter replies or YouTube comments for a piece of content and then run the names through this API to see what the gender breakdown looks like (since Twitter & YouTube do not make this information public, the best you can do is guess it from the names). This also appears to be how other third party influencer databases “guess” the demographics of popular influencers, as there is no way to know for sure.
While you’re welcome to use Gender API directly (they have some neat tools for Excel plugins and CSV file processing), we provide an integration on our platform too that you can use with other workflows. For example, if you have a Twitter scraping workflow set up with us and want to scrape the genders by username, you can create a new workflow here and use the input linking to match the output of one of your workflows (like account name) here, so we will automatically look up the genders for you after running an initial scrape. Please reach out to our support if you need help with this!