On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post from editor Bruno Skvorc sharing information about a "gender" extension for PHP that tries to guess the gender of a first name.

Recently, I ventured into a section of the PHP manual which lists extensions that are used to help with Human Language and Character Encoding. I had never looked at them as a whole – while dealing with gettext, for example, I always kind of landed directly on it and ignored the rest. Well, of those others, there’s one that caught my eye – especially in this day and age given the various controversies – the Gender extension.

This extension, in short, tries to guess the gender of first names. As its introduction says: "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."

This is interesting beyond the fact that the author is kinda called George Michael. In fact, there are many aspects of this extension that are quite baffling.

He then walks through some examples of putting the extension to use, evaluating various names in different languages and gauging the results. The extension allows for definite answers (is male/female), relative results, unisex, a "couple" or, when all else fails, erroring or giving a "not found" result. It also can check for "nicknames" for common names. He walks you through getting it installed and shows other functionality for getting similar names and checking for nicknames, showing code examples and the resulting output.

The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by Sammy K Powers, has released their latest episode today with guests Beth Tucker Long, Eyrn O'Neil and Samantha Quiñones - Episode #29: The Only Girl in the Room

Inspired by a panel discussion at Midwest PHP 2015, we discuss what barriers exist for women in the PHP community and what we can all do to remove gender bias.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page video player or directly over on YouTube. If you enjoy the episode be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get information about future episodes as they're released. You can also catch previous episodes by going to the main page of the site and scrolling through the "Past Episodes" section.

In response to this post from Elizabeth Naramore a fellow community member Anna Filina has posted some of her own thoughts on the subject.

There are so many thoughts that I just couldn’t explain in a single comment on her blog, so I decided to write an article about it. Before you read it, know that my intention is simply to share my own point of view. I don’t have many facts to back up my claims. I’m just an observer. Know that I might be very harsh in my opinions, but I mean no disrespect to anyone. Feel free to disagree with me.

She touches on discrimination, the issues other duties (parent/house) can cause and her thoughts on why many women avoid IT positions.

For as much as gender shouldn't be an issue in IT, sadly it still is. There's differences between men and women in our industry and Elizabeth Naramore has written up a post looking at some of those differences, the gender balance in the IT market and what can be done about the unfortunate shift its seeing towards fewer and fewer women in IT (and in her more specific examples, the PHP community).

I know many women don't get that far to make it to a conference or user group meeting. For one reason or another, they choose to skip the community bonding, leave an open source project after contributing, or maybe even leave the industry altogether. In fact, we're leaving in droves. I couldn't help but wonder to myself what those reasons were, so I embarked on my own little research project.

She looks at the IT job market overall, the distribution of the "gender numbers" in it and why some of it might be happening. She also asks why the gender difference should even matter and what can be done to help keep things even across the board.

She's done an excellent job on both researching and writing up some of the differing perspectives of the IT industry as viewed through a female's eyes and what both those women and the communities that want to draw them in can do.