Gender, sex and forms! Oh, my!
Quite a few people lately have asked about putting gender/sex onto various forms whilst being inclusive, here’s the general questions I have and advice I give.
TL;DR:
Why do you need to know their gender?
What do you really want to know?
Did you mean sex or gender?
If needed, the ‘safe’ options are female, male, other and prefer not to say.
Why ask?
Generally the first question to ask is: why?
- Why do you need gender on your form?
- Is this for a pizza website, or a hospital?
Depending on your domain you may need the information, but the vast majority of the time the reason for it is gathering data, often for marketing purposes, and you could probably do without. (Datensparsamkeit)
Questions about using gender information:
What are you hoping to gather from the data?
- If you find out 71% of your user base are women, is that useful? How?
- Is your marketing gender based? Why? Is it important?
- What changes? Pronouns? Pictures? Colours? Advertising?
- Can you just ask for preferred pronouns/title?
There can be valid reasons to collect gendered information, just do so knowing the effects and having a valid reason to do so.
Did you mean sex or gender?
So now that you’ve established that you want to ask, which do you really want to know about? Sex or gender?
- Do you want to know how a person identifies and feels?
- Or, their primary/secondary sex organs? (Australia’s definition *sigh*)
As a warning, if you need to know ‘sex’ be VERY sure that is what you need. Lots of people, myself included will instantly leave any website that asks me. There are very few reasons to need to know, a common example is medical forms which even then can be off putting and useless. If someone has an eye injury, knowing their sex is probably not going to be helpful whilst potentially making the person feel significantly worse.
Changing genders/sex
If you’ve decided that you want to go ahead and have gender/sex on your forms, then you have to decide if you’re going to let people change it.
It is really frustrating when a company won’t let you change genders and can be quite annoying to see gendered content such as pronouns when it is inaccurate.
- Is the time needed to make it changeable worth it versus the cost of angry users?
- Would it be easier and beneficial to just not ask?
An example is my phone company, my bills get addressed to “Mr Claire Dodd” <- Which is quite annoying and they refuse to let me change it.
So, what do I put on the form?
Gender
The generally ‘safe’ options are female, male, other and prefer not to say.
With ‘other’, put a text field to let the person say how they identify.
Also, yay for alphabetical order, I see so many forms where male is first, the only logical reason i can see is if the is the vast majority of user base identifies as male and you’re trying to make their lives slightly easier.
Sex
The general approach is female, intersex, male, and prefer not to say.
Now you know some of the questions that go into deciding if you need that one small part of form.
Just remember, it may look like an insignificant detail not worth taking the time to consider, but there are people out there to whom it can mean a great deal and appreciate you taking the time.
And of course, there’s plenty more to ask and know, go forth and question everything! Let me know if there’s anything in particular I can help with!
❤ your friendly neighbourhood transgirl,
Claire
Useful resources: (Courtesy of Fi)
- Gov.uk guide to gender and sex: Gender and sex — Government Service Design Manual
- Australian government guidelines:http://www.ag.gov.au/Publications/Documents/AustralianGovernmentGuidelinesontheRecognitionofSexandGender/AustralianGover…
