There’s been a lot of talk about women in tech these days. Headlines include both the repugnant and up-lifting. One the ugly side, we’ve all read about the sexual harassment and mistreatment at famous . On a more uplifting note, more s and are celebrating women’s contribution to tech — and to take up careers. tech companies campaign movies inspiring future ladies STEM For International Women’s Day, we decided to tackle this issue with APIs. We built a project that determines how many of Stack Overflow’s top-ranked 3,479 users are women. We collected this data by connecting to public APIs (Stack Overflow and Clarifai’s Visual Recognition API) through . RapidAPI How We Got the Numbers Since connects to multiple APIs through one abstraction layer, finding this data was relatively easy. Here are the APIs that we used through RapidAPI. RapidAPI Stack Exchange API We exported the top 3,500 Stack Overflow users with the Stack Exchange API. We sorted users based on Stack Overflow . A user gains or loses reputation by, in , “posting good questions and useful answers.” reputation Stack Overflow’s words Clarifai API We used the to determine the gender of the user based on their profile picture. The Clarifai API works by returning a probability that the face in the image is a masculine or a feminine. When the API could not find a face in the image, we categorized the result as unclassified. Clairfai Visual Recognition API’s Demographic model Now, onto the results! The Results You can dig into the for yourself, but here are the key stats and some additional analysis. raw data Out of the top 3,479 profiles, the visual recognition API classified 1,515 profile images with a discernible gender. Out of the profiles with a discernible gender, the visual recognition API classified 5.6% as feminine and 94.4% masculine. The top 100 Stack Overflow users consist of 77 masculine profiles, 21 unclassified and 1 feminine profile. In total, the visual recognition API classified 1,428 profiles as masculine, 84 as feminine and 1,964 as unclassified. Finding 0: Most Stack Overflow profile pictures are gender neutral The vast majority of Stack Overflow profiles had a gender neutral image or icon as a profile picture, which made it trickier to categorize. . Out of the top 3,500 profiles, 1,512 had a profile image with a discernible gender To give you some context, here are some example profile pictures that the API would (obviously) not classify with a gender. Finding 1: There is only one woman in the top 100 Stack Overflow users Since the is still in alpha, we went through the top 100 results manually as well. We found Unclassified users either had gender neutral profiles (see Finding 0), did not provide enough information to determine gender or identified outside the male/female gender binary. One user even identified as non-human! Clarifai Demographic model 77 masculine profiles, 21 unclassified and 1 feminine profile. Finding 2: The Clarifai Demographic Model is still in Alpha The Clairfai API’s Demographic model is pretty fun to play with — you can test a call in your browser through the . However, we noticed the model is definitely still in alpha. For example, this Seminoles fan’s profile picture was returned as “feminine.” RapidAPI package The API may have some limitations when it comes to illustrated characters or icons. Conclusion & Next Steps Determining gender on Stack Overflow turned out to be trickier than we initially anticipated. Many users favor icons or illustrations over profile pictures, which made it more difficult to identify gender. To get better results, a iteration of this experiment could include the , which determines a probability that a name is associated with a masculine or feminine gender. Accuracy improves with location, so we exported that data as well. future Gender API
