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Comment by throwawaymath | Hacker News Reader

I editorialized the title a bit - the author's title is "Simulating identification by zip code, sex and birthdate." Instead I've used the salient conclusion of the article, which is pretty interesting.

This article is a footnote to another front page submission by the same author, "No funding for uncomfortable results." While that article is sobering, I find this one to be technically cooler. The author uses a simple probabilistic calculation - alongside a Python simulation - to demonstrate how 87% of Americans are uniquely identifiable, given these three points of data.

Not a novel finding, but I like the way the author demonstrates the conclusion analytically and programmatically.

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I think that your alteration of the title is good, but why did you change "sex" to "gender"?! The study appears to be about sex as a matter of public record, so you've added inaccuracy, or at least ambiguity, to the title.

Oh good point. I don't know, I was writing from memory. I didn't mean any offense by it and didn't think about the implied difference between the two terms. Sorry!

In some cultures, sex is what you do, gender is what you have. So for me, when asked for sex, my answer is "yes, please". When asked for gender it's M/F.

I understand that the US is different in this regard.

I agree sex is a verb and also an attribute...

Sex is only a verb in the case of determining the sex of an animal.

It's generally understood that sex is biological and gender is social, or grammatical: it makes sense for those two to go together as in many languages, including standard English, you need to know a person's gender in order to talk about them easily.

In the UK, at least, official documents specify "sex", not "gender". We may be slowly moving towards a world in which sex is officially recorded only in medical records, while gender is an optional field in social media accounts and the like.

Wow. Cultural differences get me downvoted.

All the forms in my country, especially the government ones, use 'gender' and not 'sex'. For me, when I see 'sex' on a form, it's jarring to say the least.

I'm Australian.

That's interesting. I wonder what's going on there. Do the words "sex" and "gender" have slightly different meanings for an Australian, or are the Australian forms asking a slightly different question from the UK ones?

But your passport says "Sex / Sexe" just below your date of birth, right?

The design of passports is rather precisely defined by an international standard. Interestingly, and perhaps relevantly, Australia is one of a dozen countries that routinely allows its citizens to have an 'X' instead of an 'F' or 'M' in that field. There is an ongoing legal case to obtain that right in the UK (Christie Elan-Cane).

Does your driving licence indicate "sex" or "gender"? A UK driving licence shows neither, and it doesn't give a "title", either: just full name, address, date of birth, and photo. In most cases that would allow one to guess the sex and gender of the holder, of course, but not always.

Is sex male/female and gender "what I identify as"? I've always thought of them in this context as meaning the same thing...

In medical and demographic datasets where there is a need to differentiate between biological sex and self-identified gender then yes, they are used that way.

But in other settings they are usually conflated.

Biological sex is most often male or female, but not always. People can be born intersex (with genitalia that are neither clearly male nor female, which is often “corrected” surgically at birth, and/or with genitalia that don’t match what’s expected from their chromosomes, and/or with chromosome combinations other than XX or XY). Chimerism can result in different parts of the body having different sex chromosomes. It’s not strictly monolithic or binary.

That aside, yes, “sex” broadly refers to biology in some way, though often oversimplified, while “gender” refers to identity and expression (which also don’t necessarily go hand in hand).

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