Onomastics API for Gender Studies

[AGENDA] Meet us on 29 April 2014 at DataTuesday Paris with Girls in Tech Paris, on the topic ‘Women & Data’.

Gender Equality in French Politics

Women fill 26.17% of the seats at the French National Assembly (‘L’Assemblée Nationale’), according to the count of ‘M.’ and ‘Mme’ at
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/qui/xml/liste_alpha.asp?legislature=14
That’s double the figure of ten years ago (2002: 10.9%), good job ladies!

If that list did not indicate M. and Mme, could we still recognize the gender from the politician name? NamSor has published a simple API for Gender Studies which would give the following result: 26.31% (more that 99% accurate compared to the actual figure).

What about the Corporate World?

Playing with old data from a previous life in the corporate world (which cannot be disclosed), applied onomastics tell us that among ~4000 top company executives with a median base salary of 230,000 $ (USD), men landed a neat 890 million $ while women got 143 million $ in total. This huge gap is the result of less women having a top job and men earning ~20% more on average for the same job.