Gender is complicated for the data scientists at Flipkart, India’s leading ecommerce site. It’s not enough, for example, to know that the shopper is female. What if she’s shopping for her husband today? So, apart from the label she chose while signing up for the account, there is also a behavioral gender.
Behavorial gender is gender based on your behavior, whether you tend to shop like a female or a male when using your account. This behavior can also vary from session to session, so there’s a third in-session gender.
“We have to compute the label gender when we send you survey results so that we can address you properly and all. But when we have to show you what you want, we will piggyback on the behavioral gender and [adjust that] as soon as we know a little bit about this session [and] what your mood is today,” says Sandeep Kohli, Flipkart’s senior director of engineering.
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