Birds of a Rainbow Feather

With the proliferation of social media and digital platforms, user data has grown exponentially accompanied by a growing recognition of the uses of such large data sets. While demographic inference from big data sources is emerging as a significant use case of big data systems, the detection of a person’s gender and/or sexuality is often viewed as a key and foundational component, that is also uniquely problematic. This episode accompanies a survey that was undertaken to provide an approachable overview of the various methods researchers and other actors are using to infer gender and sexuality from large data sets, and explores the numerous problems and curiosities present in these methods.