Using the World Gender Name Dictionary

May 30, 2023

May 30, 2023 ・ 5 minutes reading time

Woman watching a video on a laptop and taking notes
Image: Getty Images/damircudic
Learn how to find and apply WIPO’s World Gender Name Dictionary. Disambiguate the gender from any dataset by following a few simple steps.

The World Gender Name Dictionary (WGND) now offers a 2.0 version with a higher availability of records of countries and territories and names of physical persons. Its documentation files and libraries are available online for users to get started with applying gender name dictionaries to any dataset with names linked to geographical codes.

Recent research has made novel contributions to expand the WGND, which now includes more than 26 million records linking names of physical persons and 195 different countries and territories. The WGND 2.0 updates its predecessor WGND 1.0 and is the result of compilations of more than 50 new different sources of gender data and updates to the original list of sources.

Where to find the WGND 2.0?

The WGND 2.0 is available online in the IES Gender Open Source Project. It has a dedicated Github repository with a documentation describing varying sets of unique observations on gender data linked to country and language codes. Supporting documentations of both the WGND 1.0 and 2.0 versions are also accessible in Harvard Dataverse.

How to use the WGND 2.0?

The first step is to prepare a dataset with names of physical persons and country codes. Once this dataset is ready, the next step is to perform four data cleaning checks as follows:

  • Remove family names or surnames in the name records, so only first or main names are left out in the name variable.
  • Set up the remaining name records in lowercase and remove blank spaces before and after the names’ text.
  • Delete double spaces in between the words making up each final name record.
  • Ensure that codes of countries and territories contained in the dataset are in the alpha-2 digit codes defined in ISO 3166-1. A full list of available ISO 2-digit codes is available online in the ISO Online Browsing Platform or io.

Then, users can access the Gender-it tool in GitHub to apply the WGND 2.0 libraries to the resulting cleaned dataset. Gender-it contains WGND 2.0 libraries that are retrievable by using Stata or Python (Watch the video tutorial below). Libraries in these software options contain detailed instructions and examples for downloading the necessary documentation files, functions and packages for matching the user’s cleaned database with the varieties of gender name dictionaries that are available in WGND 2.0. Stata users can get started by running the tutorial_genderit.do file while Python users can do so by running the introduction to gender-it.ipynb file.

Video tutorial

The video tutorial is divided into four sections guiding users to work around the WGND 2.0 libraries, slide the video to the minute marks to look for the desired section.

  • Introduction - 00:00 min
  • STATA - 06:48 min
  • Python - 24:36 min
  • Trips and tricks - 32:40 min
Technical Workshop on Using WIPO’s World Gender Name Dictionary

Related resources

Expanding the World Gender-Name Dictionary: WGND 2.0

Guidelines for producing gender analysis from innovation and IP data

Disclaimer: The short posts and articles included in the Innovation Economics Themes Series typically report on research in progress and are circulated in a timely manner for discussion and comment. The views expressed in them are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of WIPO or its Member States . 

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