Replacing column values in a pandas DataFrame

I’m trying to replace the values in one column of a dataframe. The column (‘female’) only contains the values ‘female’ and ‘male’.

I have tried the following:

w['female']['female']='1'
w['female']['male']='0' 

But receive the exact same copy of the previous results.

I would ideally like to get some output which resembles the following loop element-wise.

if w['female'] =='female':
    w['female'] = '1';
else:
    w['female'] = '0';

I’ve looked through the gotchas documentation (http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/gotchas.html) but cannot figure out why nothing happens.

Any help will be appreciated.