

Why "Gender" is a Text Field on Diaspora - r11t
http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/11/26/disalienation/

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buster
Sounds horrible to me. Gender is either male of female. There is no gender
called "Ada Lovelace" and no gender called "yes" (haha, you are such a funny
guy..).

Now i'd like to search for all male people from germany with interests in IT.
Oh what? Some of them wrote "male" some wrote "man" and what not? Wait, that
doesn't work anymore? I very much hope the freetext form is banned again.. If
people want to express that they are funny or "special" they can do that in
another textfield, like self description, but not in the gender textfield,
that's just stupid and NOT well thought of.

Internationalization is another nightmare here. People will put the gender in
their local language in that field. Great.

~~~
wanderr
Gender is a more complicated issue than the question of whether or not the
user has a penis. For marketing purposes it might make sense to narrow down
the selections to Male, Female and Other, but if the point is to allow users
to express themselves, that's inadequate.

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duskwuff
I've seen a few sites that take a cue from Facebook and limit the selections
to "male", "female", and "it's complicated".

~~~
buster
That sounds like a good solution, i'd prefer that..

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Mz
_Four years ago, at my first rails job, I worked at a company with a mostly-
lesbian customer base. It turns out, in that context, knowing if someone is
“male” or “female” gives you almost no useful information. The lesbian
community has other widely-accepted categories of gender, but the company’s
internal order tracking software — a well-known package from a national vendor
— offered only male or female._

I kind of wished this part had been elaborated on. I think this is the most
interesting and salient point in this piece.

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petervandijck
Jives nicely with this recent post about classification and allowing for
ambiguity:
[http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/11/23/4827/data-c...](http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/11/23/4827/data-
cleanup-and-allowing-for-ambiguity)

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oomkiller
The real answer here is to change the field name to "Sex" which only has two
possible outcomes based on what biological reproductive role you fill. While
it could technically be three, adding a blank would solve this.

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_who
Maybe you should do a little research about Gender vs. Sex.

