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gendercoder

The goal of gendercoder is to allow simple re-coding of free-text gender responses. This is intended to permit representation of gender diversity while managing misleading responses and the workload implications of manual coding.

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("ropensci/gendercoder")
library(gendercoder)

Basic use

The gendercoder package permits the efficient re-coding of free-text gender responses. It contains two built-in English output dictionaries, a default manylevels_en dictionary which corrects spelling and standardises terms while maintaining the diversity of responses and a fewlevels_en dictionary which contains fewer gender categories: man, woman, boy, girl, and sex and gender diverse.

The core function, recode_gender(), takes 3 arguments,

  • gender the vector of free-text gender,

  • dictionary the preferred dictionary, and

  • retain_unmatched a logical indicating whether original values should be carried over if there is no match.

Basic usage is demonstrated below.

library(gendercoder)

df <- data.frame(
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE,
  gender = c("male", "MALE", "mle", "I am male", "femail", "female", "enby")
)

df$manylevels_gender <- recode_gender(
  df$gender,
  dictionary = manylevels_en,
  retain_unmatched = TRUE
)
#> Results not matched from the dictionary have been filled with the user inputted values
df$fewlevels_gender <- recode_gender(
  df$gender,
  dictionary = fewlevels_en,
  retain_unmatched = FALSE
)
df
#>      gender manylevels_gender       fewlevels_gender
#> 1      male               man                    man
#> 2      MALE               man                    man
#> 3       mle               man                    man
#> 4 I am male         I am male                   <NA>
#> 5    femail             woman                  woman
#> 6    female             woman                  woman
#> 7      enby        non-binary sex and gender diverse

The package also includes a local Shiny app for interactive recoding:

The app uses a bs4Dash interface and accepts .csv, .dta, .sav, .rds, .rda, and .RData files. Stata and SPSS files require the optional haven package. The app displays the selected gender column and the recoded output column, then lets you download the full recoded data.

Contributing to this package

This package is a reflection of the cultural context of the package contributors. We acknowledge that understandings of gender are bound by both culture and time and are continually changing. As such, we welcome issues and pull requests to make the package more inclusive, more reflective of current understandings of gender-inclusive languages and/or suitable for a broader range of cultural contexts. We particularly welcome addition of non-English dictionaries or of other gender-diverse responses to the manylevels_en and fewlevels_en dictionaries.

The Adding to the dictionary vignette includes information about how to make changes to the dictionary either for your own use or when contributing to the gendercoder package.

Acknowledgement of Country

We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the custodians of the land on which this package was developed and pay respects to elders past, present and future.