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.
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.
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 generate neutral pronouns 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
i learned from a friend that used to work in banking that some countries have laws that basically make contracts and invoices void if they are not correctly gendered.
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.
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.
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 generate neutral pronouns 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
HR software in Germany needs to know because we have to send this information to the government. Along with a lot of other information.
i learned from a friend that used to work in banking that some countries have laws that basically make contracts and invoices void if they are not correctly gendered.