If I understand right, you want something like this:
w['female'] = w['female'].map({'female': 1, 'male': 0})
(Here I convert the values to numbers instead of strings containing numbers. You can convert them to "1"
and "0"
, if you really want, but I’m not sure why you’d want that.)
The reason your code doesn’t work is because using ['female']
on a column (the second 'female'
in your w['female']['female']
) doesn’t mean “select rows where the value is ‘female'”. It means to select rows where the index is ‘female’, of which there may not be any in your DataFrame.