Script to look up the gender of Dutch first names
This script determines the gender of Dutch persons by looking up their first name in a database of the Meertens Institute. The database indicates how often the name occurred as a first name for men and women in 2010. If the name is used for women substantially more often than for men, the name will be interpreted as female – and vice versa.
The reason I wrote the script has to to with this article on how the performance of women professional road cyclists is improving. I wanted to check whether a similar trend is going on among amateur riders, more specifically, participants in the Gerrie Knetemann Classic (incidentally, the script would take Knetemann for a woman – it’s not foolproof). The results of the ride are available online, but pre-2012 editions lack information on the gender of participants. So that’s what the script was for.
Speed of participants in Knetemann Classic
[if lte IE 8]>Unfortunately, older versions of Internet Explorer don’t display this graph. You may want to get Firefox.
The results of the analysis aren’t exactly clearcut. The number of women participants in the 150km ride varied from 36 to 46, or 5 to 8% of the participants whose gender could be determined (the percentage for 2013 was 6%). The (median) speed of women participants rose in 2013, and more so than for men, but this rather thin to speak of a trend.