Why "Gender" is a Text Field on Diaspora | Hacker News Reader

Why "Gender" is a Text Field on Diaspora

sarahmei.com

26 pointsr11t12 comments

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.

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.

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

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

Mh, probably it's more complicated in english. It's quite clear for me. In german the gender is either male or female, that's the definition and there is now question of "self expression". If someone wants to stand out and express something special, why not use another text field? I think it's just "childish" to use the gender field to "express myself" and enter "Ada Lovelace". What purpose does that have? Or to fill in "yes" in the gender field? It's just stupid and doesn't belong there.

Why is that a nightmare? It makes discriminating on gender more difficult, which in my book is good.

> Now i'd like to search for all male people from germany with interests in IT.

Why would gender be so important? And odds are, if you're looking for everyone defining themselves as male, searching for "male" will match 99% of your intended audience anyway.

Totally. I hate how they let you choose from all the different states in web forms. You're either East Coast or West Coast. Pick a side.

How am I supposed to do a search for people on the West Coast with interests in BDSM? What if someone puts "California" and someone puts "Oregon"? Those are both the same coast!! How am I supposed to search for that??

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.

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

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.

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

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