“Gender: Female or Male?”

Why we should really get it right.

“Gender: Female or Male?”

There it is — the dreaded Gender/Sex mix-up. Unfortunately, it happens much more often than you’d think and pops up in all kinds of scenarios, from filling out forms at my physiotherapists’, to completing a McGill student feedback survey, to registering an account on a website, to (of course) psychological testing!

Why is this important? As a researcher, getting participants for your study is your lifeblood…why would you want to alienate, however inadvertently, a whole population of people who would be willing to participate but bolted due to feeling uncomfortable from your ill-phrased question? Also, the fact that you could have made someone feel uncomfortable in the first place is also bad enough ….just as tests can have a therapeutic value, they can also reinforce negativity and constrictive societal views, and generally project insensitivity and marginalization. Additionally, if that person continued filling out the survey, negative feelings about themselves or the survey could permeate, affecting their results and/or your data (depending on whether the test is for research or for their own benefit). And overall, this is just an important thing to do. It doesn’t take that much effort on the part of the researcher, and this kind of accuracy should really be expected, especially given the large number of professional organizations who can’t seem to (or don’t want to) make the distinction between sex and gender.

But don’t get me wrong, just because it’s right doesn’t mean it’s easy. There’s obviously also a lot of other nuances and errors that can be made; for example, including something like “Transgender” under sexual orientation when the two don’t have to have anything to do with each other. In fact, on my original questionnaire for the test development project, I thought I was being inclusive by putting the option of “Trans*” under “what gender do you identify with?” Someone alerted me to the fact that even “Trans*” could be restrictive in that it just collapses all the diversity within that group to a “*” (and who knows that “*” really is supposed to mean) and it could actually negatively highlight transgender as automatically outside of “Man” or “Woman,” even when many transgender people do identify with “Man” or “Woman.” Therefore, just putting “Other” and leaving a blank is actually more helpful and inclusive because that allows the person to fill in that blank themselves.

Don’t misinterpret this blog post as a call-to-arms to defend politically correctness, because PC implies there’s no real purpose. This, on the other hand, is something that is genuinely important to and affects many people. Not to mention, if you’re collecting data, this could improve the accuracy of your data; or if you’re doing something like educational or medical testing, it could make for a more inclusive and comfort-improving way of testing. Thus, we (all designers and administrators of tests) all have a responsibility to make an effort to learn more about these issues if we’re not well-versed in them, and to get it right.