I get asked for my gender often in online forms. What is it ultimately used for? Even for my employment why does my employer care what gender I am or my sexual orientation? Personally I think there is an over emphasis on gender and sexual orientation. I don't care about your gender or sexual orientation unless I want to have a sexual relationship with you.
What's even more insane is when they ask for your race. I've been asked that by US based entities and I literally don't know what to answer because I've never been asked that in my country and don't actually know what "race" I am.
For US employment, collection of gender and race information is implied necessary by the Civil Rights Act (because if someone files a discrimination / wrongful termination suit, one of the first questions that will come up is "Well, what are the demographics of the organization in the first place" and if the organization doesn't know, that's an automatic bad sign.)
Some federal contracting also places requirements on a company's demographics.
I always feel ridiculous being called caucasian. I understand somehow it's come to mean some version of white. But it just makes me think of the Caucuses mountains and how little I can identify with Georgia or wherever.
The US requires employers provide "Equal Opportunity" across races. Legal departments have interpreted this to mean "we will ask everyone about their race to collect data to prove we aren't racist"
Note that the tracking is desired because a seemingly neutral policy can still be illegal; the EEOC gives the following example:
> An employer has a "no-beard" rule, which disproportionately excludes African American men because they have a higher incidence of pseudofolliculitis barbae, an inflammatory skin condition caused by shaving. The employer must be able to demonstrate that beards affect job performance or safety. Also, there must be no alternatives to a strict "no-beard" rule that would meet the employer's business or safety needs.
Those forms (nearly?) always include a "prefer not to say" option.
We need to track it in the US now because we _used_ to track it. If you spend 400 years tracking ethnicity to use for systematized oppression, you have to continue to record it for at least the next few generations just to measure your progress away from that system.
This is very strange to me too. Election exit polls are broken up by race, as well as most other statistics. It's such a ubiquitous case of institutional racism no one in the US even thinks of it as such, apparently.
The answer is there are no good reasons, but one cycle goes like this:
1. HR gets asked by their employees for statistics on how many non-binary/PoC/women/<insert your label here> people in the organization are represented in management/executive/engineering/<insert your probably under-represented role here>.
2. The org at first responds "We don't know because we don't collect this data".
3. The question-askers respond "How convenient, that's because you know they're under-represented".
4. Company responds with typical "meritocracy" answer, then eventually launches long, drawn-out process because hey, "we're a data driven organization!"
5. Years later, after the original question-asker is long gone they share the data, ideally after a few cycles that show <current under-represented individuals> have grown from small percentage of total to slightly larger small percentage. Company loudly boasts on all social media platforms about wokeness and snowflake status.
6. Times change and society moves on, leading to questions of "why does the company care if I'm <whatever, it's now a non-event, progress!>"
7. Employees respond with lack of giving a sh!t or manufacture false outrage at the violation of their personal privacy.
8. the cycle continues, while data deteriorates, leading to some pretty hilarious options in drop-downs.
Many things have "reporting requirements" where, for example, your employer is required to report your gender and race to the government to determine how sexist and racist they are.
I suspect it's very rarely actually important, it's just on the list of things they always have asked for and always will.
Diversity numbers show up on reports that affect ESG investment. ESG funds will buy more of your company’s stock if you have a higher percentage of women on boards, for example, and other metrics.
And some positions are only offered to diverse candidates or candidates from a particular subgroup, like LGBT etc. Last year, one of the roles I had to fill was diverse-only. Only applicants of color were allowed to apply for the role.
As I mentioned in a different comment, gender might be necessary for the feature of displaying content that addresses you, since some languages have gender baked in, there is no genderless 'you' form like in English.
However, in most applications and services, this is not used like that. The gender mapping seems to be used exclusively to determine whether the marketing emails should start with "mr." or "mrs.".
My understanding is that asking the sexual orientation question is illegal at least in some states. Personally never been asked that by any employer in CA.
What I also find a bit strange is when people feel the need to tell you what their sexual orientation is, even though you didn't ask. What's also strange is when you consider what you would have to ask them to have them give you that as their answer.
And in some cases it could even be considered as sexual harassment.
Example: "I am lesbian" in other words means I'm sexually attracted and may or may not have sexual intercourse with another woman.
Now try to think of questions you would have to ask to receive the above as the answer.
Maybe it's just me, but unless asked, it feels very inappropriate to just tell people with whom you have sex or wish to have sex with. Especially when the topic of conversation was about something completely different and in no way related.
> I don't care about your gender or sexual orientation unless I want to have a sexual relationship with you.
I feel the same way and have never been able to get a good answer for this one. "Statistics and hiring" is a very lame-duck answer. How does it help our product knowing that we have +1 more homonormative person?
For healthcare, I think it makes a lot of sense, as diseases affect different genders differently. Also, those with certain sexual orientations are more prone to certain diseases. It's crucial to understand someone's gender, sexual activity, and even race to give them proper healthcare.
As a physician, I don't have to be gay in order to understand diseases that affect primarily gay communities, how those diseases spread, or how to treat them. There's a big difference between a group you study and a group you hire. The two groups can certainly overlap, but they don't have to.
Yes and no. There is also substantial proven bias in healthcare relating to gender and race.
Unfortunately, I think that's another reason we need to collect those statistics. Because if we can't measure the problem, we'll have a very hard time fixing it.
I've been asked on two job applications lately whether or not I'm "asexual". I'm not, but I'm appalled to be asked this in a professional setting. If I was, I'd also be appalled, if not seriously distraught.
I immediately dropped the applications. Perhaps screening out people like me was the real goal to begin with, and maybe it's a win-win after all.
Quite often, it seems, they ask to build your profile to sell to advertisers. As much as it would be great for everyone to be treated equally, our genders do affect the crap that we buy and advertisers often care about it.
But more broadly, finding trends/patterns really does come down to being able to sort people into different buckets. Especially now, with the push towards ML, you never know which feature will turn out to be significant, so the strategy ends up being to collect as much data as possible and let computers churn through it looking for patterns.
It would be tempting to ascribe a gender-specific motive to the collection of gender data just based on the significance that we feel towards gender. But I'm not sure those collecting it have those motivations. They're just sucking in everything that they can get away with in the hopes that some of it will prove valuable.
I don’t think it’s necessary in most cases, although oddly I recently had a medical insurance claim rejected because of a gender mismatch for my wife. (USA and all the health insurance mess)
Turns out that my employer deliberately doesn’t send gender to the insurance company. This means it defaults to male. A urologist appointment for kidney stones was then rejected by the insurer when it didn’t match the provider.
If this was an Ob/Gyn appointment that makes a little more sense, but kidney stones and urology in general are non-gendered. This was not the first claim either. Plenty of others were fine with other providers.
I can see gender being used sort of generically for fraud prevention in some cases. But, it’s a stretch to say it’s broadly useful.
In general now I lie on forms about as much as I can. At Panera Bread I was asked if I’m the CEO when my account came up first name Panera, last name Bread. There’s no reason for any personal data, so I don’t give it.
Gathering this by employers is part of US federal law. It is also passed to your insurer, and used to do... insurance things invisibly.
Gathering this by companies is so they can better profile you and serve you tailored content (as defined by them.) E.g. If you respond "Man", they might want to send you fewer ads for tampons and more ads for razors or whatever. Note, I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's the reasoning.
Ideally/ostensibly, this data collection is helpful for accountability, at the company level and also entities like Labor Dept. statistics. The concern is that companies who strive to be colorblind and non-discriminatory in their hiring don't end up that way in reality. And that assessment is impossible without some effort at data collection.
Sad but true. Which begs the question, if they're inclusive of a certain race and gender, are they exclusive of others?
This whole agenda towards absolute equality in all aspects of life is ridiculous. Why settle for race and gender? Let's make sure we have equal amounts of people by eye and hair color, height, weight, or any other criteria. Doing anything less is surely discriminatory.
What would be correct, though? I don't think "It's not important" is really a satisfactory answer. There are many scenarios in which a site might want to personalize content for a voluntarily submitted gender preference. One example might be a site for people who want to have a sexual relationship with someone else.
Most of these questions are about identities that have sometimes been discriminated against (intentionally or unintentionally). The reason for asking is to make sure that the process is reaching the people it's supposed to. Like, if you're running a vaccine clinic that is intended for everyone, but women don't feel comfortable going there, you'd like know that's happening so you can dig into why.
As people have mentioned, this applies to hiring -- but at the top of the funnel in who your posts are reaching/motivating, not just at the end for diversity stats.
To your point, we don't usually ask for similar information like blood type in online forms. In the past, single/married was much more frequently asked. Are we at the point where gender is heading the same direction? For signing up for a library card or a Netflix account, no. But it depends on the context.
I don't think salutations seriously matter in most (English-speaking) countries. Even in professional settings, I receive emails that address me by my first name.
Even still, if you must record the relevant salutations, you can ask for the salutation to use rather than the gender or sex.
A very similar thing is asking for your feedback on every second page of the website, and then forwarding it straight into /dev/null. It's because once you shared it via their website, you will be less inclined to go post a (possibly damaging) opinion elsewhere. Your instinct to be heard has been satisfied, and the chance of a negative review visible to others has decreased by N%, which is still good enough for "economies of scale".
Similarly, HRs have somehow collectively figured out that if you nudge people to self-express by stuffing their gender issues into the peers' faces, they will be less likely to self-express by demanding better salary, scheduling, working conditions, etc. It organically grew from the "employee of the month" bullshit and other "trinkets in lieu of a raise" programs, and is now reaching completely ridiculous levels. Hopefully, the rising inflation will give people a more tangible problem to solve, and we will see more focus on things like quality of life, affording kids, retirement perspectives, and so on.
As a trans person I hate all half-assed inclusion measures, on top of the fact if I point this stuff out I sound like one of the 'bad ones'. It just made everything confusing whether it is asking for sex or gender. Medical stuff sure I'll disclose everything cause it's relevant to me getting good service. However, there are so many companies that want to just obviously use the info for ad revenue... What features are you bringing me that are improved cause you know my sex? What features are you bringing me that are improved cause you know I'm trans?
Huh, yeah, good point. "So you can better manipulate me into buying stuff" is a really non-compelling reason for me to give you sensitive personal information.
Pronouns if you don't need gender/ads but want a personal experience, then add gender for ad stuff and disclose it, if you don't need sex. Use modern terms where sex is referring to biology and gender as identity. Just avoid labelling and getting personal information all together when ever possible. When they do label I want it to just be the scientific definitions to keep things standard.
Prefer not asking at all. If you have to ask then a free optional text field. If you cant clean the data, then have three options: Female, Male, Other (specify), picking “other” will add another optional free text field. That’s it.
I'm sort of not surprised it's gotten to this point. In the early era of companies coming out to show their support, businesses wanted to show support in solidarity. The current state just feels like virtue signaling.
These are amusing, silly, embarrassing, cringey, and somewhat kind of sad.
I think (and kind of hope) that we might be slowly progressing towards an era where we stop discretizing gender into specific labels. The ever-growing number of labels suggests, to me at least, that we've got a wrong fit for the data type. I think it's rather simple: a multi-dimensional continuum of gender identity cannot be reduced to specific names. But that concept of "discrete gender" is very well-entrenched in society, so there's an attempt to make it fit by adding more discrete categories.
I'm not sure this is "wrong" given that I don't think society/culture/whatnot ever turns on a dime. But I don't think this represents a satisfactory state.
A good place to start is to stop asking for "gender" when it's completely unnecessary for whatever service is being offered. I think most websites don't need to. And if they're legally obligated in some way, that needs fixing.
...Am I making any sense? I'm having a moment of struggling to render my thoughts to words.
No, that makes total sense to me. My general feeling about gender is, "must we?" I just get exhausted at the insistence some have on dragging gender into everything.
I get that it was socially convenient (for some) to compress the multi-dimensional continuum into a binary. (Or in many other cultures, something more complicated.) But I think at this point we either add the extra bits or just stop fussing about it so much. Hopefully both.
That said, I think it's entirely possible to usefully reduce a multi-dimensional space to discrete labels without excessive harm. Look at the actual space we live in, for example. Naming places and regions can be both useful and helpful as long as we don't take the names too seriously. I suspect the same is true for the space of gender. But as with physical space, I'd rather let people self-organize and self-identify than for one group to try to impose their boundaries upon others.
As a geographer I completely appreciate the value of quantization. You’re right, it can be done and has value in the abstraction. Though it’s rarely free of issue, too. I’m thinking about border disputes. Gerrymandering. Square cows.
100% on your last point about self determination. If people want to define themselves, by all means!
What you've described is what most non-binary, trans, and many queer folks believe. (And many allies as well.)
The idea that there are "only two" genders is, imo, a bit of a 20th century lens, and I expect we'll move to disentangle gender from what anatomy do you have.
I agree that asking for gender is fraught. I am non-binary, and I constantly have to either lie or just choose "Not sharing". The best systems just take a string and leave it at that.
The only example here where I imagine a legitimate use case is the (Canada only) one, where some idiotic beaucracy is in place to handle folks who need to update gender on government identification (like passports)
1. diverse - This is likely German and standard on German gender selectors, it refers to anybody who identifies as neither male nor female.
2. Mrs Prof Dr. - Again this is likely German, and is not a gender selector, rather a title selector. It is standard in Germany to use both Prof and Dr titles, the Mrs then implies female. You wouldn't use it conversationally.
I (an American) joined a business call with some Germans and when they were speaking in German, they referred to each other as "Herr Müller" and "Frau Schmidt" then since I joined they switched to "Jens" and "Nadin." I just found that to be an interesting cultural difference.
Gender != Chromosomal sex != Physiological sex != Hormonal sex != Gametes produced (gametic sex).
A man is most commonly (by percentage of total adult human population) an XY male, with a penis/testes, and produce sperm.
A woman is most commonly (by percentage of total adult human population) an XX female, with vulva/vagina/uterus/ovaries and breasts, and produce eggs. Older women (after menopause) no longer produce eggs and so have neuter gametic sex.
Pre-pubescent children don't produce gametes, and thus have neuter gametic sex.
A trans man is an XX female, possibly with surgical alterations to physiological sex, possibly with hormone replacement therapy to alter hormonal sex, and possibly (if either of the two former are present) with neuter gametic sex. Being a man does not require being male.
A trans woman is an XY male, possibly with surgical alterations to physiological sex, possibly with hormone replacement therapy to alter hormonal sex, and possibly (if either of the two former are present) with neuter gametic sex. Being a woman does not require being female.
Other combinations are possible.
Confusing gender with the various forms of sex and sex characteristics is unnecessary and causes confusion.
It is true that gender is distinct from sex. But "Physiological sex", "Gametic sex", and "Chromosomal sex" are all the same thing. chromosomal disorders are not distinct sexes. Klinefelter males are still males, despite an extra X chromosome. Nor are Jacobs syndrome, Turner syndrome, etc. If a layperson saw a Turner syndrome female lying on a slab in a morgue, they would have zero problem identifying the body as female. These disorders often impair gamete production, but they're still the same sex. Likewise menopause does not change someone's sex. "Gametic sex" is redundant: sex determines gametes produced. Going through menopause or dropping sperm counts is not changing one's sex. When biologists say that sex corresponds to gametes produced, it's implying that it also encompasses "has produced in the past". A woman going through menopause continues to be female.
A post-operative trans person will display different physiology from what their chromosomes indicate.
"Gametic sex" is only useful when discussing fertility, and is (mostly) a function of the other aspects of sex, but can change to neuter without altering the others (e.g. via vasectomy).
Chromosomal sex can't change. It's the fixed characteristic. For most people, the other aspects of sex, gender, and sexual attraction are determined by their chromosomes.
If one is making a distinction between these aspects, it's important to be clear about which parts can vary. A trans man is much less likely to be color blind than a cis man, for example, so if you're studying color vision you should ask whether the subject has a Y chromosome and not what their gender identity is. If you're selling clothing, you probably want to know the gender identity (for the style) and physiology (for the fit), but don't care about the chromosomes. You'll get bad data if you mix them up.
It's an old word. It's been used both as a synonym for sex and as a different concept for most of its existence. Ideally we'd invent a new word to make the distinction easier.
I have never heard the term "gametic sex". How is it a useful distinction, when it normally changes throughout a person's life, unlike sex in any other interpretation of the word?
... indicates that the webmaster has never been to Germany etc. These are titles, not genders. In some countries the titles "Mrs.", "Doctor", "Professor" pile up into one combined title. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that drop-down list in much of Europe.
The tags "#titles #medical #academic" seem to indicate that this is well known by the web master.
I personally think it's silly to require someone to fill in the title in all use cases except for the title an education facility puts on one's fancy piece of paper. There's a certain vanity to it, like programmers who insist others call them "engineers".
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with that drop-down list in much of Europe.
And there is much wrong with it in other parts. It's two generations ago that the war against sexism put 'mrs' out of style over here, so it feels quite culturally insensitive in academic and therefore international environments to keep asking women if they are married or not.
But nowadays "Frau Doktor" usually refers to a woman who is a doctor, as "Doktor" has a male grammatical gender, so it's awkward to address a woman only as "Doktor X", even though that's technically acceptable. The grammatically female word "Doktorin" has not caught on, even though it's also correct.
There was no difference in German, it was "Herr Doktor" ("Mr Doctor") and you'd address his wife "Frau Doktor" ("Mrs Doctor"), so you couldn't tell who of them actually held the title (not sure what happened after divorce). Today, you need to get your own title, no more shared titles through marriage.
You can't fathom a situation where a German website would need or want to have a drop-down for English speakers in Germany? Because that's clearly where this came from.
Yes there is. Why would you possibly need to know this? You think it's more important to gather personal data just to do some email templating versus respecting the privacy of your users?
TBH I wished these sorts of dropdowns simply asked for pronouns and title for most sites. If I'm Dr. PuppyTailWags, he/him pronouns, that's all most companies need from me. I'm sure some exceptions exist: of course my doctor should know if I go by he/him but have a uterus, of course my dating profile should specify who I want to date. But say, my meal delivery service shouldn't care lol.
1) Because that's how people do it. Sometimes we all collectively settle on a standard that isn't the best, but that's just how it's done.
2) It allows for more easily expanding to multiple pronouns, e.g. "he/they" or "she/they", which indicate that the person is ok with "she/her/hers" or "they/them/theirs".
3) It makes it easier to state neopronouns (e.g. xe), by standardizing the form -- he/him/his is the same format as sie/hir/hirs or xe/xem/xems.
4) (My opinion) It feels more natural to say "he him" than just "he". "What are your pronouns?" "He." I dunno, it's a short enough utterance that it could be easily to mishear?
So you know how to refer to them to other people or in conversation. The order notes preference. So someone might use they/him, which means they prefer you use ‘they’ but if you use ‘him’ it’s okay.
It is redundant for the common pronouns. But once you step outside that space, people may need to see both. E.g., "they/them" is in the process of becoming established, so some will need the pair. And if somebody is using one of the neopronouns, most people are going to need to see both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopronoun
This redundancy is quite irritating to me. For most people, their pronoun is simply "he" or "she". Showing other parts of speech is only necessary for nonstandard pronounds.
Call me user, I'm going to use a fake name every time anyway. I couldn't be any less concerned with how I'm addressed by a machine as long as it isn't 'citizen', because I ain't picking up any cans.
The issue here is that your proposed approach is very English-focused. Not every language would allow for a straightforward "pronouns" selector that would result in a meaningful data point.
I'm confused why it matters how you're referred to in the third person. I'm not trying to be snarky: but you're not there if you're being talked about in the third person (like a police report or a newspaper article), and if you're there, they will use the English "you" which is gender neutral.
I'm confused that you're confused. You're never referred to in the third person, either when present or absent? Or if you are, do you not care at all what pronoun they use for you?
For data collection purposes, a "sex" field is more informative than a "pronoun" field. That's not to say a "pronoun" field wouldn't be informative, only that pronouns supervene on sex except in outlier cases.
For what data collection purposes? You care more about whether I have a penis or vagina than whether I associate more with football and trucks or with dresses and makeup? If you want to know which ads to show me, the latter is going to be much more informative for you, even though gender is a weak signal for that. It's crazy to say that sex is more informative for all purposes. When I'm registering for some online service, why in the hell would you care whether I have a penis or a vagina?
Honestly, you could even skip pronouns. Just default to you & possibly they for third person references and write copy that avoids weird interactions of the word.
That's exactly right. Asking for pronouns only really makes sense in a single-language situation, but most of the world's population uses more than one language.
On the one hand, you can't reasonably force people to select either masculine or feminine, particularly in English. On the other hand, if someone has answered the gender question with "neither / other" or "unknown / I prefer not to say", how would you refer to them in French, say? Would you ask "êtes-vous heureux", or "êtes-vous heureuse"? Unfortunately many languages do not currently have an established or convenient way of referring to non-binary people. (Though perhaps it's true that "most" languages are like Finnish or Hungarian in that gender does not feature in the grammar at all. The Indo-European and Semitic languages with which English speakers are most familiar are somewhat exceptional in that respect.)
Readit News
Some federal contracting also places requirements on a company's demographics.
Note that the tracking is desired because a seemingly neutral policy can still be illegal; the EEOC gives the following example:
> An employer has a "no-beard" rule, which disproportionately excludes African American men because they have a higher incidence of pseudofolliculitis barbae, an inflammatory skin condition caused by shaving. The employer must be able to demonstrate that beards affect job performance or safety. Also, there must be no alternatives to a strict "no-beard" rule that would meet the employer's business or safety needs.
Those forms (nearly?) always include a "prefer not to say" option.
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1. HR gets asked by their employees for statistics on how many non-binary/PoC/women/<insert your label here> people in the organization are represented in management/executive/engineering/<insert your probably under-represented role here>.
2. The org at first responds "We don't know because we don't collect this data".
3. The question-askers respond "How convenient, that's because you know they're under-represented".
4. Company responds with typical "meritocracy" answer, then eventually launches long, drawn-out process because hey, "we're a data driven organization!"
5. Years later, after the original question-asker is long gone they share the data, ideally after a few cycles that show <current under-represented individuals> have grown from small percentage of total to slightly larger small percentage. Company loudly boasts on all social media platforms about wokeness and snowflake status.
6. Times change and society moves on, leading to questions of "why does the company care if I'm <whatever, it's now a non-event, progress!>"
7. Employees respond with lack of giving a sh!t or manufacture false outrage at the violation of their personal privacy.
8. the cycle continues, while data deteriorates, leading to some pretty hilarious options in drop-downs.
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I suspect it's very rarely actually important, it's just on the list of things they always have asked for and always will.
And some positions are only offered to diverse candidates or candidates from a particular subgroup, like LGBT etc. Last year, one of the roles I had to fill was diverse-only. Only applicants of color were allowed to apply for the role.
Now sexual orientation, that's a head scratcher.
However, in most applications and services, this is not used like that. The gender mapping seems to be used exclusively to determine whether the marketing emails should start with "mr." or "mrs.".
And in some cases it could even be considered as sexual harassment.
Example: "I am lesbian" in other words means I'm sexually attracted and may or may not have sexual intercourse with another woman.
Now try to think of questions you would have to ask to receive the above as the answer.
Maybe it's just me, but unless asked, it feels very inappropriate to just tell people with whom you have sex or wish to have sex with. Especially when the topic of conversation was about something completely different and in no way related.
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I feel the same way and have never been able to get a good answer for this one. "Statistics and hiring" is a very lame-duck answer. How does it help our product knowing that we have +1 more homonormative person?
Apparently it helped Subaru a lot. [1]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/how-sub...
If you have zero, and you're big enough to be collecting data, there's a good chance that something is wrong.
Unfortunately, I think that's another reason we need to collect those statistics. Because if we can't measure the problem, we'll have a very hard time fixing it.
I mean, I guess both, but it's primarily sexes, isn't it?
I immediately dropped the applications. Perhaps screening out people like me was the real goal to begin with, and maybe it's a win-win after all.
Quite often, it seems, they ask to build your profile to sell to advertisers. As much as it would be great for everyone to be treated equally, our genders do affect the crap that we buy and advertisers often care about it.
But more broadly, finding trends/patterns really does come down to being able to sort people into different buckets. Especially now, with the push towards ML, you never know which feature will turn out to be significant, so the strategy ends up being to collect as much data as possible and let computers churn through it looking for patterns.
It would be tempting to ascribe a gender-specific motive to the collection of gender data just based on the significance that we feel towards gender. But I'm not sure those collecting it have those motivations. They're just sucking in everything that they can get away with in the hopes that some of it will prove valuable.
Turns out that my employer deliberately doesn’t send gender to the insurance company. This means it defaults to male. A urologist appointment for kidney stones was then rejected by the insurer when it didn’t match the provider.
If this was an Ob/Gyn appointment that makes a little more sense, but kidney stones and urology in general are non-gendered. This was not the first claim either. Plenty of others were fine with other providers.
I can see gender being used sort of generically for fraud prevention in some cases. But, it’s a stretch to say it’s broadly useful.
In general now I lie on forms about as much as I can. At Panera Bread I was asked if I’m the CEO when my account came up first name Panera, last name Bread. There’s no reason for any personal data, so I don’t give it.
Gathering this by companies is so they can better profile you and serve you tailored content (as defined by them.) E.g. If you respond "Man", they might want to send you fewer ads for tampons and more ads for razors or whatever. Note, I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's the reasoning.
This whole agenda towards absolute equality in all aspects of life is ridiculous. Why settle for race and gender? Let's make sure we have equal amounts of people by eye and hair color, height, weight, or any other criteria. Doing anything less is surely discriminatory.
As people have mentioned, this applies to hiring -- but at the top of the funnel in who your posts are reaching/motivating, not just at the end for diversity stats.
Like, why should they know?
I'm happy for them to have anonymized stats for decision making, but they shouldn't have it attached to a record with my name.
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We hate it, but we're required to.
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Even still, if you must record the relevant salutations, you can ask for the salutation to use rather than the gender or sex.
Insurance.
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A very similar thing is asking for your feedback on every second page of the website, and then forwarding it straight into /dev/null. It's because once you shared it via their website, you will be less inclined to go post a (possibly damaging) opinion elsewhere. Your instinct to be heard has been satisfied, and the chance of a negative review visible to others has decreased by N%, which is still good enough for "economies of scale".
Similarly, HRs have somehow collectively figured out that if you nudge people to self-express by stuffing their gender issues into the peers' faces, they will be less likely to self-express by demanding better salary, scheduling, working conditions, etc. It organically grew from the "employee of the month" bullshit and other "trinkets in lieu of a raise" programs, and is now reaching completely ridiculous levels. Hopefully, the rising inflation will give people a more tangible problem to solve, and we will see more focus on things like quality of life, affording kids, retirement perspectives, and so on.
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I think (and kind of hope) that we might be slowly progressing towards an era where we stop discretizing gender into specific labels. The ever-growing number of labels suggests, to me at least, that we've got a wrong fit for the data type. I think it's rather simple: a multi-dimensional continuum of gender identity cannot be reduced to specific names. But that concept of "discrete gender" is very well-entrenched in society, so there's an attempt to make it fit by adding more discrete categories.
I'm not sure this is "wrong" given that I don't think society/culture/whatnot ever turns on a dime. But I don't think this represents a satisfactory state.
A good place to start is to stop asking for "gender" when it's completely unnecessary for whatever service is being offered. I think most websites don't need to. And if they're legally obligated in some way, that needs fixing.
...Am I making any sense? I'm having a moment of struggling to render my thoughts to words.
I get that it was socially convenient (for some) to compress the multi-dimensional continuum into a binary. (Or in many other cultures, something more complicated.) But I think at this point we either add the extra bits or just stop fussing about it so much. Hopefully both.
That said, I think it's entirely possible to usefully reduce a multi-dimensional space to discrete labels without excessive harm. Look at the actual space we live in, for example. Naming places and regions can be both useful and helpful as long as we don't take the names too seriously. I suspect the same is true for the space of gender. But as with physical space, I'd rather let people self-organize and self-identify than for one group to try to impose their boundaries upon others.
100% on your last point about self determination. If people want to define themselves, by all means!
The idea that there are "only two" genders is, imo, a bit of a 20th century lens, and I expect we'll move to disentangle gender from what anatomy do you have.
I agree that asking for gender is fraught. I am non-binary, and I constantly have to either lie or just choose "Not sharing". The best systems just take a string and leave it at that.
2. Mrs Prof Dr. - Again this is likely German, and is not a gender selector, rather a title selector. It is standard in Germany to use both Prof and Dr titles, the Mrs then implies female. You wouldn't use it conversationally.
A man is most commonly (by percentage of total adult human population) an XY male, with a penis/testes, and produce sperm.
A woman is most commonly (by percentage of total adult human population) an XX female, with vulva/vagina/uterus/ovaries and breasts, and produce eggs. Older women (after menopause) no longer produce eggs and so have neuter gametic sex.
Pre-pubescent children don't produce gametes, and thus have neuter gametic sex.
A trans man is an XX female, possibly with surgical alterations to physiological sex, possibly with hormone replacement therapy to alter hormonal sex, and possibly (if either of the two former are present) with neuter gametic sex. Being a man does not require being male.
A trans woman is an XY male, possibly with surgical alterations to physiological sex, possibly with hormone replacement therapy to alter hormonal sex, and possibly (if either of the two former are present) with neuter gametic sex. Being a woman does not require being female.
Other combinations are possible.
Confusing gender with the various forms of sex and sex characteristics is unnecessary and causes confusion.
"Gametic sex" is only useful when discussing fertility, and is (mostly) a function of the other aspects of sex, but can change to neuter without altering the others (e.g. via vasectomy).
Chromosomal sex can't change. It's the fixed characteristic. For most people, the other aspects of sex, gender, and sexual attraction are determined by their chromosomes.
If one is making a distinction between these aspects, it's important to be clear about which parts can vary. A trans man is much less likely to be color blind than a cis man, for example, so if you're studying color vision you should ask whether the subject has a Y chromosome and not what their gender identity is. If you're selling clothing, you probably want to know the gender identity (for the style) and physiology (for the fit), but don't care about the chromosomes. You'll get bad data if you mix them up.
... indicates that the webmaster has never been to Germany etc. These are titles, not genders. In some countries the titles "Mrs.", "Doctor", "Professor" pile up into one combined title. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that drop-down list in much of Europe.
Edit: looks like I was beat to it.
I personally think it's silly to require someone to fill in the title in all use cases except for the title an education facility puts on one's fancy piece of paper. There's a certain vanity to it, like programmers who insist others call them "engineers".
And there is much wrong with it in other parts. It's two generations ago that the war against sexism put 'mrs' out of style over here, so it feels quite culturally insensitive in academic and therefore international environments to keep asking women if they are married or not.
But nowadays "Frau Doktor" usually refers to a woman who is a doctor, as "Doktor" has a male grammatical gender, so it's awkward to address a woman only as "Doktor X", even though that's technically acceptable. The grammatically female word "Doktorin" has not caught on, even though it's also correct.
Fifty years ago, could be either.
Nowadays, no.
Has anyone ever declared themselves to be male in the first person, female in the third, and neutral/plural in the possessive: "he/her/their"?
1) Because that's how people do it. Sometimes we all collectively settle on a standard that isn't the best, but that's just how it's done.
2) It allows for more easily expanding to multiple pronouns, e.g. "he/they" or "she/they", which indicate that the person is ok with "she/her/hers" or "they/them/theirs".
3) It makes it easier to state neopronouns (e.g. xe), by standardizing the form -- he/him/his is the same format as sie/hir/hirs or xe/xem/xems.
4) (My opinion) It feels more natural to say "he him" than just "he". "What are your pronouns?" "He." I dunno, it's a short enough utterance that it could be easily to mishear?
You will sometimes see people write something like "he/they", but that just means that either are acceptable.
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On the one hand, you can't reasonably force people to select either masculine or feminine, particularly in English. On the other hand, if someone has answered the gender question with "neither / other" or "unknown / I prefer not to say", how would you refer to them in French, say? Would you ask "êtes-vous heureux", or "êtes-vous heureuse"? Unfortunately many languages do not currently have an established or convenient way of referring to non-binary people. (Though perhaps it's true that "most" languages are like Finnish or Hungarian in that gender does not feature in the grammar at all. The Indo-European and Semitic languages with which English speakers are most familiar are somewhat exceptional in that respect.)