> Is that really the first criticism that comes to mind when discussing this very specific endeavor?
This is how Show HN works. Someone makes a thing -- a form to collect data. Someone else finds that it's missing options they would find useful, so they offer a suggestion with supporting links to explain why the missing stuff would be useful. Now the form can be improved. High fives all around.
> There are MILLIONS of forms like that all over the internet.
There are millions of everything on the internet. But it's hard to find successful sites with mandatory gender fields and only two options, because that alienates users for no reason, and alienating users for no reason isn't what successful sites do.
Think about it this way: you might choose "female" sometimes to mess with marketers, but "male" is still an option. If you were filling out a form and the only options were "female over 35" and "female under 35," do you think that might tend to discourage male responses?
In the UK current best practice (although it's still changing) would be to have two questions: one asking about gender identity and another asking about gender reassignment.
Someone born as male who identifies as female should need to tick "other", they should be able to tick "female".
As a point of clarification, this should be "identifies as a woman". Sex (male/female) is a physical characteristic, gender (man/woman) is a social construct.
More info from transman's first link:
> Sex is assigned at birth, refers to one’s biological status as either male or female, and is associated primarily with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women. These influence the ways that people act, interact, and feel about themselves. While aspects of biological sex are similar across different cultures, aspects of gender may differ.
EDIT: The text you quote does not say that man / woman and male / female have different uses. There's nothing to say that male / female only refer to sex not gender.
If what you said is true (and it isn't) people would only need two questions on forms:
"Are you male or female?"
"Are you a man or a woman?"
This would make no sense and so we can safely ignore it.
Yes, people do still conflate sex and gender terms. But language is increasingly shifting toward using male/female to describe sex and man/woman to describe gender because it results in greater clarity.
Sex and gender are separate concepts, and having separate terms for each is a net positive for the English language IMO.
Yes, in this context it's extremely important. It's well accepted there's a pay gap between males and females. However there are also discrimination and pay differences for people who associate with non-cys gender identities. If you're going to expose wage information, it's important that it's done so not only in the name of efficient markets, but also in terms of social equality.
It would also be helpful to know the numbers by race. If eye color discrimination ever becomes a problem people are discriminated on, then that should also be included.
I definitely agree with you that surveys should always include an "other" option for gender, but I'm wondering why you don't want to fill it out otherwise? I'm guessing from your username that you're a man, so why don't you want to pick "male"?
So a lot of trans and gender-questioning people, once they get onto the "wtf is gender anyway" question, realise that while their brain likes running on testosterone or estrogen, and they might like or dislike their body in different configurations... eventually they realise that they exist outside the gender binary - they feel that they're neither entirely on one extreme of a "spectrum" of gender, nor the other.
Some people wind up being genderqueer - others genderfluid - and yet more agender. All of these people don't fit in either "male" or "female" categories, and usually tend to fill out forms as either "other" or "I don't want to tell you". It's currently at the point in my country where some banks allow the title of Mx - a title for people who don't fit into the binary.
And of course other people just really don't want to tell people their gender if they don't have to.
I feel like this is missing the point that "gender" in a questionnaire is not asking you what you think you are, but what you really are. There is a scientific definition of the word gender that is being ignored here.
And also yeah we could get rid of that kind of questions in "some" questionnaires, but for these kind of mass statistic tools this is interesting for example to see if females are paid less than males. I don't think people are interested in the .1% that is transgender as it will probably be too low to make valid statistics.
> I feel like this is missing the point that "gender" in a questionnaire is not asking you what you think you are, but what you really are.
No, in this case it's a combination of what you are (i.e. your gender identity), and what whoever decides on how much they'll pay you thinks you are, mostly. But there's all sorts of variables in there still - a single variable probably isn't wonderful. Is a trans woman usually paid more or less than a cis woman? Is a genderqueer person usually paid more or less than X, etc etc? Does their identity filter into it or only their presentation - maybe people pick up on subconscious cues?
> There is a scientific definition of the word gender that is being ignored here.
The scientific community, since they accepted the existence of transgender people, mostly uses "sex" for the biological makeup of a person - and I'll point out that even that's not entirely binary, with the generally entirely ignored group of intersex people.
> I don't think people are interested in the .1% that is transgender as it will probably be too low to make valid statistics.
This sort of assumption has the issue of othering groups of people - asserting that certain groups of people are "other". This has issues well past individual studies - it's a societal issue where we decide that certain groups of people are not worth listening to. There's a set of comics written by a queer author on the subject here: http://www.robot-hugs.com/notice/
When you're designing a form, it's not that difficult to accept options that you haven't thought of straight away - in fact, it's bad data science not to, as otherwise you get a bunch of people who either refuse to respond or box themselves in to whatever you force them to be, even when it's inaccurate, and you can't distinguish them from anyone else. After all - the question "which religion are you?", as might've been used in times past, would ignore atheists, and it'd be even worse if it only accepted the top 3-4 religions in a given country.
My point was that this "variation" is not big enough to alter the data, and can be counted as false-positives. I don't think the comparison to a religious select input without atheism is fair since atheists represent a fairly large chunk of the population.
When you fill out gender as party of identifying yourself publicly (e.g. Facebook profile), of course it totally makes sense to have "long-tail" options so that people can fully express themselves, simply because the purpose is to be a public act of self-expression and self-identification. (So kudos to Facebook for including so many options.)
However, for surveys, especially smaller ones like this (i.e. not the US Census), I wonder if adding a third gender option adds to, or diminishes from, the final result. Clearly, the objective here is to compare male and female salaries. Reporting "other" salaries would almost certainly be statistically insignificant (and therefore simply "throwing away" the data), given traffic to the site (not in the millions) and the slim proportion of the population that self-identifies as "other".
Whenever there are two populations, there will usually be elements which don't fit perfectly into either -- male/female, straight/gay, introvert/extrovert. Even with quantitative measurements, your height, weight, and income can all vary from hour to hour, day to day, or month to month, and easily fall on one side of a threshold or another at different times.
But when you fill out any kind of survey, you just have to pick one or the other. Many surveys ask for income categories, and a freelancer just has to decide if they think they're over $60K or under, even though the answer isn't clear at all. In a health survey, whether your BMI reports you as normal weight or overweight might depend on how much water you drank today. But you've just got to pick one.
So when filling out gender on a survey, a survey that is primarily about other things (not about smaller shades of gender distinction), is it really that offensive to simply choose between whether you're closer to self-identifying to male or to female in your current workplace? And if you really feel like a 50/50 split, to pick one at random?
Or, for the purposes of estimating pay disparity, do you really feel that there is no use at all in choosing male or female? That when you were hired, you were not viewed by your hiring manager as more towards male or female, but clearly and primarily as transgender, and so your salary information is useless in estimating any male/female wage difference?
I would except ALL aspects of demographics would be useful here. Not just gender but ethnicity, age hell I could even see height being useful considering you hear a lot of "you have to be taller to be CEO" crap; it would be interesting if there is anything to those stereotypes.
Is that really the first criticism that comes to mind when discussing this very specific endeavor?
Heck, I'm a male, but often put female in forms, just to not give marketeers my info...