Renaming multiple levels - change "man", "Male", "M" into "male" in R

Question

I'm handling a dataset which contains a gender column with messy data. I'd like to change "man", "Male", "M" and "MALE" all into "male".

Is there a convenient way to do this such as grouping them together and assign them the same new name "male"? I tried several packages but none of them could assign one new name to multiple old names.

Thank you so much!! This is the final project of my first semester :)

Answer 1

library(tidyverse)
gender<-c("man", "Male", "M", "MALE", "female", "f", "F", "women")
df<-data.frame(gender)

Here is a tidyverse solution:

df %>% 
  mutate(
    new_gender = ifelse(gender %in% c("man", "Male", "M", "MALE"), "men", "women") 
  )

You get:

 gender new_gender
1    man        men
2   Male        men
3      M        men
4   MALE        men
5 female      women
6      f      women
7      F      women
8  women      women