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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? |