[quesera]

Wow, that's misplaced hostility.

If you wanted to deride the fact that many folks here won't spent multiples of effort on special, experimental, no-right-answers-and-likely-to-be-criticized-for-it-if-you-even-try cases that affect minuscule fractions of their potential user base, well...get in line behind the IE5 advocates, I guess.

Someone recommends using a free form entry for gender. No amount of normalization will fix the "ham sandwich" entries (except that we know they are nearly all male), so you'd trade the integrity of a small percentage of your data for the appearance of "making an effort" for the vanishingly small percentage. Net fail.

Just to be clear, my primary feeling here is that -- in the hypothetical case where gender matters -- you're best served by keeping it simple: (female | male | other/it's complicated | prefer not to answer). This should serve all cases equally.

[eksith]

The solution is already available by the very same folks who would just as easily think nothing of presenting that "female | male | other/it's complicated | prefer not to answer" field though.

In lieu of questioning who the user is, may I suggest see what the user does instead? Behavior, in the end, is the real key to unlocking demographic potential. What purchases are made, what items were clicked on, where they had browsed and what titles on pages attracted them on the site can tell far more than a simple field.

This, of course, takes time and testing plus accumulation of data. But since a fair number of HN users also like to exalt the status of "Big Data", there's a more productive use for it.

Don't try to finagle who the user is or isn't. Just find out what they want.

[batemanesque]

ah yes, because trying to be decent & inclusive to persecuted minorities is the comparable to supporting an obsolete browser - yr analogy is a perfect illustration of the grotesque intersection between the Valley & bigotry.

also, "the hypothetical case where gender matters" is a glorious illustration of straight privilege

[quesera]

> a glorious illustration of straight privilege

Gender has nothing to do with orientation. Please don't propagate such normative misunderstandings.

If I may restate for clarity: in most cases of software implementation, a user's gender is not important data (obvious exceptions include medical and related fields).

Generally, gender should not be requested. Where requested, it should not be required. Where required, one should have no compunction against answering randomly.

That's prerogative, not privilege.

[batemanesque]

opted for "straight privilege" as an alternative to "cisprivilege"that I thought HN people were more likely to understand. I'd have thought it was obvious I wasn't actually talking about orientation