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Understanding gender by name segmentation

How we match shopper first names to gender, and how it helps personalize your PDQ setup

Haim avatar
Written by Haim
Updated over a week ago

PDQ includes a gender segment in your analytics, rules, and A/B testing tools — all based on the shopper’s first name at checkout.

This is a lightweight and powerful way to personalize your shopper experience, with ~97% name coverage out of the box.

Once the name is picked up during checkout, here’s what happens next:


How we segment by gender

  1. We take the shopper’s first name
    This comes directly from the checkout field, no extra input needed.

  2. We clean the name before matching
    Names are lower‑cased, stripped of accents, and transliterated (so “Élise” becomes “elise”).

  3. We match it to our reference table
    Names are checked against a public dataset of 200,000+ first names. If we find a confident match, we assign:

    • Male

    • Female

    • If no match → Unknown


A quick example

A shopper named “Noa” checks out.
→ We clean the name to noa
→ Match it to the dataset
→ Assign Female (based on majority labeling in the data)


What you can expect

  • On average, 97–98% of names are recognized

  • Gender-neutral names (e.g., “Alex”, “Jamie”) may be misclassified

  • If a name is too rare (<10 matches in the dataset), it defaults to Unknown


Continuous improvements

Every night, we:

  • Check for names that showed up as “Unknown”

  • Flag high-frequency names

  • Add them (with the correct gender) to our reference table. That means your data keeps getting more accurate, automatically.


    How accurate is the gender data? In our tests, it’s ~95–98% accurate. Most mistakes are due to gender-neutral names.


That’s it! Your PDQ gender segmentation is working behind the scenes — helping you personalize more intelligently, with zero setup required.

As always, if you need help just reach out on chat or at
📩 support@prettydamnquick.com

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