Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I find it interesting that whenever you hear about a crime, some mention is made of both the victim's and the perpetrator's Facebook pages. Looking at some of the things people put on there, do they really want that as their final message to the world should they fall victim to a crime today?" -- DaBroad, June 2009

[Oh, forgetful me ...]

So, for the umpteenth time, I got ticked off at a web site that required new registrants to pick a gender of "male" or "female" before leaving a comment, and for the several-th (but less than umpteenth) time, I fired off a note to the contact address for the site, asking why that was a mandatory field, and if it was mandatory then why didn't it include the right answer.

Uh, unlike most other web sites I've prodded about this, instead of getting completely ignored, or getting a patently insincere "to serve you better" with no farther explanation, or a buzzword-based brush-off, I got a polite note from a manager, explaining (acceptably vaguely) why the question is there^[1], promising to take it up with the relevant director when he gets back from someplace-else^[2], ...

... And asking for suggestions for labels to add to the list for that field, other than "other", which I had already pointed out was, by definition, 'othering' when it's the only option shown beyond M and F.

I want to make sure I'm giving good advice.

I remember reading some useful discussion of exactly this question sometime in -- uh, the last eighteen or twenty months? -- but can't remember where. It was the kind of discussion where folks supported their opinions and tried to take into account data-analysis messiness as well as the feelings of us folks with not quite "standard" gender (and, IIRC, at least part of the conversation looked specifically at "understand our readership better" and "tell advertisers what our demographic is" reasons for collecting the data in the first place, as opposed to medical situations or dating sites, for example.) Do any of y'all happen to remember where that/those discussions took place, or maybe even have them bookmarked? One of the trans-issues sites? Folks trying to get LJ to improve the gender field in user profiles? DW trying to decide how to set up the same field?

I'm mostly looking for a pointer to the discussion I remembered seeing before, rather than wanting to hash it all out from scratch in comments here, but I'll take folks' thoughts here too.

Off the top of my head, I'm inclined to suggest "male", "female", "both", "neither", "other", as a reasonable (though imperfect) starting point, assuming that they want to keep a pull-down list, don't want to try to list every gender-identity label currently in use, and think too many people would pick "decline to answer" if that were offered^[3]. But I've got this nagging feeling that there were some problems with that scheme that came out in the last discussion, that I really ought to remember.

[1] "This helps us better understand and define our audience which will in turn define and shape the future of our business. This is primarily a research question." This makes me wonder just what they think the gender info is really telling them -- are they working from a stale (or exaggerated) list of expected behaviours/tastes based on gender, or keeping careful track of how what correlations there are change over time, or just tweaking their content by trial and error to try to keep the male-identified:female-identified ratio in a range that makes their advertisers happy? But ultimately, not my problem. I just want the gender field to be made more inclusive, optional, or both. Whether they're being smart about what they do with the data, I'll probably never know.

[2] But no promise that anything would actually get done, because he doesn't know whether they have the ability to alter that part of the form -- which I'm guessing means that the registration/comments section of the site is a package they bought somewhere else or a setup hosted by someone else, rather than a system developed in-house.

[3] LiveJournal, which has "male", "female", and "unspecified", appears to have about 28% of users listed as "unspecified" (though the stats page makes the male & female numbers add up to 100% and ignores the unspecified precentagewise). InsaneJournal, with the same list of options (and the same way of counting percentages), shows about two-thirds of users picking "unspecified". Dreamwidth, with "male", "female", "other", and "rather not say", shows 39% under "rather not say" and 1.6% under "other". I'm guessing that the folks I'm talking to aren't going to like the idea of having one to two thirds of the answers to the gender question fall into a "myob" category if they do change the registration form.