I get asked for my gender often in online forms. What is it ultimately used for? Even for my employment why does my employer care what gender I am or my sexual orientation? Personally I think there is an over emphasis on gender and sexual orientation. I don't care about your gender or sexual orientation unless I want to have a sexual relationship with you.
What's even more insane is when they ask for your race. I've been asked that by US based entities and I literally don't know what to answer because I've never been asked that in my country and don't actually know what "race" I am.
For US employment, collection of gender and race information is implied necessary by the Civil Rights Act (because if someone files a discrimination / wrongful termination suit, one of the first questions that will come up is "Well, what are the demographics of the organization in the first place" and if the organization doesn't know, that's an automatic bad sign.)
Some federal contracting also places requirements on a company's demographics.
No, the Civil Rights Act does not compel collection of this data. It's not an "automatic bad sign" if a company doesn't collect it. In fact, it can work against you in the case of a lawsuit.
You are correct that the government has started asking contractors and large employers for some of this data. But it is only a requirement for the business itself, not for their customers.
Compel, no [edit: correction: compel yes for over 100 employees]. Heavily incentivize, yes.
"Your honor, my client was paid less than half what her male peers were paid."
"Does the defense have a counter-argument?"
"Well, uh, your honor, we, uh, don't actually know the gender of our employees, so we don't, uh, have that data at our fingertips. We probably don't, we think, but we don't have the numbers to know one way or the other, and..."
> "Your honor, my client was paid less than half what her male peers were paid."
> "Does the defense have a counter-argument?"
No. It should be more along the lines of "Prove it".
To come forth with such a claim carries with it the implication that one actually has /evidence/ for it, however (in)substantial. The response is NOT to automatically deflect to the defense in order to prove innocence.
> "Well, uh, your honor, we, uh, don't actually know the gender of our employees, so we don't, uh, have that data at our fingertips. We probably don't, we think, but we don't have the numbers to know one way or the other, and..."
Nothing wrong with that. Evidence can be procured on demand by court order. And even if it were discovered that this one individual female client were paid less than her male counterparts, you'd have to prove that it was because she was female. That means gathering evidence on what her female peers were paid, as well. This particular client could have been an anomaly (e.g. less hours worked, less responsibility, not exactly a peer to her counterparts, the lower pay was only temporary and/or due to some previous agreement, etc.) leading the courts to find nothing systemically wrong with this employer. Don't be so quick to judge, without evidence or context.
Except your own comment highlighted exactly what’s wrong with that: without the data the court won’t know how to rule. If you insist that the complainant is the one who has to investigate the salaries and work performance of all her coworkers, you’re immediately setting her up for failure. Requiring the company itself to record this information can provide evidence that they’re abusing employees—evidence that the employees themselves may never be able to produce.
> Except your own comment highlighted exactly what’s wrong with that: without the data the court won’t know how to rule.
And the burden of proof is on the accuser. The court doesn't just say "we don't have the data, so we must assume it's what the accuser says".
> If you insist that the complainant is the one who has to investigate the salaries and work performance of all her coworkers, you’re immediately setting her up for failure.
Yes! And that's exactly how the court works: the burden of proof is on the accuser.
> Requiring the company itself to record this information can provide evidence that they’re abusing employees
And why on earth would the company want to do this, when it could potentially harm them?
Civil litigation places less burden of proof in the accuser than legal litigation. They don’t have to prove beyond a reasonable amount of doubt, so all they have to do is get the jury/judge to believe the violation is likely.
They don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt like in a criminal trial, but the burden of proof is still on the accuser. The accuser has to convince the jury that discrimination occurred, it's not a default assumption that companies are biased and they have to have the data to prove they are not.
Yea I like it when criminals post their criminal activity online. It's funny cos it shows the low IQ of the criminal and when they are charged for the crime it's also funny.
Collecting employee EEO data is pretty standard, practically universal, esp. since there are things like veteran status or disabilities that have very real implications. You basically just add a checkbox. Pretty much SOP for any org over a certain size.
You could link to a government site that Clarks it is required. https://www.eeoc.gov/data/eeo-data-collections
But you as an individual are not required to give that information to your employer
The counterargument is to ask the plaintiff to explain why she thinks her gender was used as a factor in setting pay. There are all kinds of reasons why a disparity between two employees would exist: a more in demand subfield, different hours, better negotiating, etc. The burden of proof is on the accuser.
A really good defense would be to build a totally race and gender anonymized system of hiring. How could we have discriminated against your race and gender when your name was obfuscated, your voice was modulated, and we took very strict precautions to ensure nobody involved in interviewing or setting compensation even knew your gender? This was not feasible before remote interviewing became normalized during COVID, but I'm interested in seeing if it gains traction.
> The counterargument is to ask the plaintiff to explain why she thinks her gender was used as a factor in setting pay
The evidence the plaintiff brings can be as simple as "I polled ten people with my job title in the company." If the company hasn't tracked this data at all and can't produce it in its defense, then in a civil case the plaintiff would have the preponderance of evidence on their side and the resulting resolution to make them whole could be all the back-pay they are owed between what they made and what their peers made.
So even outside of the need to file EEOC-1, companies are heavily incentivized to track this data (as any competent employment lawyer would indicate); you don't want to be scrambling to satisfy evidentiary burden in a lawsuit.
The company wouldn't just say "we don't have this data." The company would point to the systems in place that ensure that protected class is never revealed to interviewers or hiring managers. "Ms. Plaintiff, how could the interviewers have been biased against or discriminated against you on the basis of your gender, if they did not know and could not know your gender when setting your compensation figures?" Unless the plaintiff has evidence that someone leaked her gender to the interviewers, it's incredibly hard to even approach a preponderance of evidence that there was gender discrimination. In order to perpetrate discrimination, you must have some means of discriminating between applicants.
If someone complains about an orchestra that doesn't have the racial or gender makeup they want, but the orchestra points out they have blind auditions and robust systems to ensure that the identities of musicians aren't leaked to evaluators then it's tough to provide a preponderance of evidence of discrimination.
I am unaware of any companies trying the hard-anonymization strategy you're suggesting (apart from, possibly, Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is not technically doing hiring in the sense that no employer-employee relationships are created). I think it would be an interesting case because there are a lot of "leaky signals" that can lead to systemic discrimination even if the company took no active measures one way or the other (for example, basing a candidate's pay on 110% of their pay at their previous employer can result in implicit wage discrimination because men tend to enter the workforce at a higher pay and catch higher pay bumps in promotions). Whether the CRA or subsequent law implies an obligation on a company to close such gaps is, perhaps, unclear.
We'd have to wait to see what happens if someone tries it. Point is: in the average case, it's setting oneself up to spend time in court, and most companies optimize for staying out of court, not becoming a test subject on the path-dependency of novel caselaw.
"Systemic" discrimination is rarely actual discrimination in the sense of illegal hiring practices. Women enter and graduate from college at higher rates than men. Thus it's "systemic discrimination" against men to require a college degree. But since it is valid to require education credentials to perform related jobs, nobody can sue for this. Almost every hiring practice is systemically discriminating at some level. If I'm hiring a Spanish to English translator, surely it's legal to ask applicants to translate a piece of text, right? But that's going to be heavily biased in favor of Latin Americans. Even the audition-behind-a-veil example is surely systemically biased in favor of people who had disposable income to hire musical instructors at a young age, and lots of free time to practice correct?
The requirements to prove a discrimination suit are far more direct: you need to prove that the company directly used protected class to make hiring or compensation decisions. And if the people making these decisions were never even informed of the candidate's protected class status it's exceptionally difficult to make the case that this was affecting this decision making.
> for example, basing a candidate's pay on 110% of their pay at their previous employer can result in implicit wage discrimination because men tend to enter the workforce at a higher pay and catch higher pay bumps in promotions
Actually, this is a perfect example of something that isn't going to get the company into legal trouble. They didn't make this decision on the basis of race, gender or another protected class. They made this decision based on something entirely objective: the candidate's previous pay. If that employee's previous employer was engaging in racial discrimination, then that's the company that vulnerable to a lawsuit.
I'm interested in this notion that you can sue your current employer, because a co-worker's past employer potentially engaged in gender discrimination that bumped their salary, which in turn was used in negotiations with the current employer. Do you have an example of any such lawsuit succeeding?
... but more importantly, this case has entangled the Fresno County public school system for over a decade. That's expensive relative to the alternative of... Not doing that.
Note that this 9th circuit ruling merely stated that pointing to the use of prior pay isn't an automatic win for the defense - this just let the plaintiff go back to lower court and try the case. The case is still ongoing, the plaintiff has not won the case.
How will promotion decisions be made? At some point I think information from people who’ve worked with the employee (co-workers, managers) will be relevant to their promotion, right?
Promotions would be harder - probably impossible - to anonymize, but at least you're working with a much, much smaller set of potential plaintiffs as compared to everyone who applied to the company. Anonymizing interviews is more feasible than ever, and it provides a very resilient defense claims of hiring discrimination. A straightforward way eliminate bias in orchestra auditions non-biased is to put a veil between the performer and evaluator. It's interesting to see proposals to do the same in tech getting downvoted.
Another great government regulation that has a great intent (stop discrimination) but leads this terrible unintended outcome: all applicants asked for this highly sensitive information.
It is so ridiculous that it gives the information to allow the company, manager, HR to discriminate (even unconsciously), exactly the opposite of what the legislation is trying to achieve.
What is worse from a cyber security perspective is that this information is now proliferated increasing the chances that it will be breached.
None of those concerns were relevant in the era when the Civil Rights Act was passed and people were hired via face-to-face interviews. It's real hard to hide your demographics when you're talking to the interviewer, which is a much larger concern than whatever you put down on a piece of paper.
For all the talk about it in this thread, we aren't moving to some kind of double-blind anonymous voice muffled 60 Minutes interview screening processes anytime soon. It's a goofy idea because once you hire somebody, people are going to work face-to-face with them anyway.
I always feel ridiculous being called caucasian. I understand somehow it's come to mean some version of white. But it just makes me think of the Caucuses mountains and how little I can identify with Georgia or wherever.
Apparently it's something people believed at one point in history; that the Caucuses region is where Noah's arc landed and is thus the region where white people originated. As a non-Christian, the term is absolutely ridiculous.
It’s a skin color, and in the US all these questions are really trying to ask that.
If your father is from Ireland, but you are dark skinned then you will suffer the same prejudices and abuses as anyone or your skin color. If your father is Kenyan and you are light skinned, you will smoothly fit in with the “white majority” without anyone digging into your history.
The context of US race questions is to counter US racism. Logical etymology doesn’t really apply.
It goes beyond simply color. For example, there are people who are racist against East Asians, and if you only showed them the color on a palette, that wouldn't be enough for them to think anything of it. They'd have to see other features, and suddenly this data field has gone from text to imagery.
> If your father is from Ireland, but you are dark skinned then you will suffer the same prejudices and abuses as anyone or your skin color.
If your ancestors came to America and were Irish, they faced discrimination just as much as other groups, if not more than most, even if they had a similar color tone as other Europeans.
For one, while the Irish faced discrimination, it was significantly less than that of non-Europeans. More importantly though, how does this have any bearing on why the question is relevant today? Are you somehow under the impression that the Irish are currently subject to extensive prejudice, or that no racialized group is?
What's more confusing for immigrants from ex-USSR (where the Caucasus mountains were located) the word "Caucasian" there is often associated (in a racist way) with "black" instead "white" because of their darker complexion (darker hair)
I haven't thought about the origin of that word before, so just checked wiki and... Yeah, it's a terrible idea, I'll make sure not to use that. White is just fine for what people mean by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
I always check "other" if "Caucasian" is the closest choice to my race. Then I put "American". I'm certainly not Irish like my paternal grandmother, nor Italian like my paternal grandfather, nor a Polish Jew like my maternal grandparents, and none of those are "Caucasian". I'd probably qualify for "White" but most of the racists who care don't traditionally consider any of the groups that my heritage is from "White". I'm an American by race, from European settler descent, and a United States citizen by nationality.
Are Iranian Persians considered Caucasian in the US or not? My Armenian friends have darker skin tones than Persian ones, so this doesn't make any sense.
I don’t understand this measure as well. Half of Caucasus mountains are in Russia, and I’m sure most USAmericans won’t like to be identified as Russians.
curiously, in Russia, Caucasians is the collective term for the nations of the Caucasus, and it is often used to express Chauvinist opinions about them. Russians are usually confused when they are referred to as "Caucasian" in american paperwork
People have downvoted me for saying the same thing. Perhaps they were offended by the term "US Americans"? It is a standard term used here in Germany and is not offensive.
The US requires employers provide "Equal Opportunity" across races. Legal departments have interpreted this to mean "we will ask everyone about their race to collect data to prove we aren't racist"
Note that the tracking is desired because a seemingly neutral policy can still be illegal; the EEOC gives the following example:
> An employer has a "no-beard" rule, which disproportionately excludes African American men because they have a higher incidence of pseudofolliculitis barbae, an inflammatory skin condition caused by shaving. The employer must be able to demonstrate that beards affect job performance or safety. Also, there must be no alternatives to a strict "no-beard" rule that would meet the employer's business or safety needs.
Those forms (nearly?) always include a "prefer not to say" option.
It's better now, but it was quite common for forms to permit only one selection and have no "Other". Having to repeated explain the existence of multiracial people to admins and H.R. types was...tiresome.
Mainly, it lets you measure how racist/sexist/etc one's system is.
For instance, if you see that applicants that are otherwise equally qualified are getting rejected on recruiter screen disproportionally by race, you may have an issue with how your screening is done. And yes, this happens: https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/randres.pdf
A reasonable goal is that race, gender, and sexual orientation should have no bearing at all on how likely it is that you get hired, promoted, or fired. So these inputs are typically blinded to hiring managers but available to HR in aggregate to let them perform these kinds of analyses.
I'll acknowledge this approach leads to some very odd interactions, like my school district asking what the sexual orientation of my five year old is. But it's not clear how else one can build a credible gauge for measuring and eliminating *isms from a system. (Open to hearing ideas!)
If you collect demographics of employees, it tells one story.
If you also collect demographics of applicants, it may tell a different story.
If your employee demographics look skewed, but they're consistent with applicant demographics, you have an easy out when accused of ism.
Of course, if you collect the information, you might also use it for ism purposes. Or you might just lose or discourage applications from non-favored people. It's hard to show.
(It also doesn't help that the federal categories feel poorly chosen and ill-defined)
Sure, 50/50 is probably not where a lot of professions should be. But it's pretty unrealistic to assume the percentage we are at is exactly where it should be. Especially considering how many women in professions like programming have so many stories about how difficult it is to get in and stay in the field.
Stories about how difficult it is to get into the field and actually having difficulty getting into the field are two very different things. 2 out of the 3 employers I've worked for had explicitly discriminatory policies favoring women. And they weren't subtle, we straight up reserved slots for women despite this being blatantly illegal.
In reality, the proportion of women in STEM directly matches the proportion of women in STEM majors, which directly matches proportion of women who say they're interested in STEM.
Except if you know that for some hypothetical demographic A and demographic B where all applicants are equally qualified you would expect the hiring to equally reflect both demographics.
If it doesn't, you have an issue. The only way to know for sure is to measure.
E: To be clear, assuming equally qualified candidates, you would want expect hiring proportions to match the same A:B ratio as you get from applications.
>you would expect the hiring to equally reflect both demographics
No, I wouldn't expect this at all as I do not expect the height distribution of basketball player to reflect the height distribution of the general population. As I do not expect the personality trait distribution of pop stars to be the same of programmers, and again I do not expect the latter to be similar to the general population. Personal inclination, innate intelligence, talent, conscientiousness, and of course demographics, parenting, generational wealth all play a role.
Thus the "assuming equally qualified candidates" in my original post.
That can be measured (imperfectly, but well enough), by filtering only for qualified candidates and then comparing the rate at which both A and B are hired and the rate at which they appear in the filtered list. E: This of course requires the filtering to be done _only_ with knowledge of a candidates skills/accomplishments, and association with demographics (including name, location, etc.) to be done only after the sorting.
> I'll acknowledge this approach leads to some very odd interactions, like my school district asking what the sexual orientation of my five year old is. But it's not clear how else one can build a credible gauge for measuring and eliminating *isms from a system. (Open to hearing ideas!)
Maybe institutions can afford to leave sexual orientation out of it until you’re talking about a body of people that is firmly within the age of consent threshold or has at least hit puberty. A lawyer might disagree but for him the remedy is to bend him over and remove the stick from his ass.
Some people think that affirmative action isn't racist.
But tell me what it is when you think like: "hey we have enough asians, exclude that person, let's find a black to get our quota"
Some people will defend it like a user said below:
"By engaging in deliberate anti-racism efforts to counteract subconscious racism."
But what is "anti-racism"? It's being racist in the opposite direction. You think Y group is being oppressed "subconciously" so you oppress X group as much as you think you need to, to "even" it out.
We should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
> Racism is a societal system where one race is systemically (and often systematically) elevated over others.
This is a definition of racism, and the one currently in vogue, but just want to point out that it's not the only one. Racism can also denote individually held prejudices, or isolated discrimination based on race.
> Anti-racism seeks to end that system.
This is indeed the stated goal, but (at least to me) seems to be self-defeatist. For instance, when reading through Ibram X Kendi's work, a number of ideas that seem flat-out wrong popped out:
* Racism against a group in power can't exist (because the redefined version of racism requires group power), as if racial power exists in a monolith.
* The only cure for past discrimination is present discrimination. (!)
* Thedesire for race neutrality is racist (not just its flawed applications)
* The idea that biology influences behavior is racist (not just the standard racist claims that some groups are inferior biologically)
I realize that these terms can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but the above ideas of "anti-racism" definitely lead to more stifling of discussion and outright acceptance of discrimination than I've otherwise experienced.
It is the one anti-racists are using, so if one is trying to understand the term, that's the right place to start.
I get that people disagree both on whether it should be ended and if so, what the right tactics are. My goal here is not to have that incredibly deep and nuanced conversation, but just to clear up this particular point.
> It is the one anti-racists are using, so if one is trying to understand the term, that's the right place to start.
Yeah totally agreed, it's important to call out the definitions of terms used in any context.
The main thrust of my post was similarly to point out that if you're using definition X, you may justify some action which doesn't conform to definition Y.
In the same vein as "Patriot Act" or "People's Republic", good branding on the part of "anti-racism" can help nip naysayers in the bud. (Are you anti-patriot? Are you against the people or democracy? Are you pro-racist?)
Knowing who means what when they use terms, and being willing to differ from someone else's definition clearly, is pretty much the only way I know of to have these deep conversations with civility.
For sure. And I think it's important to note that some of those definitions of racism are from people who others would see as beneficiaries of the system that the latter group sees as racist. That is to say, it shouldn't be surprising that as the power of whites declines, the definitions of racism they might prefer are coming under challenge.
Or in your terms of branding, it shouldn't be a shock that the dominant racial group would have established a definition of "racism" that is one more convenient to them than to the dominated groups, because that branding serves to prevent challenges to their power.
Explain how you apply "anti-racism" please. If you're excluding people based on their skin color or origins, that is racism, even if they are white or asian.
> Everybody agrees that the US was hugely racist to start out and for centuries thereafter.
Speak for yourself, not everybody. If anything we were the colony to finally collapse the system after many centuries of it being standard across the world.
It's kind of a slap in the face for all those people who fought to end it.
Your theory is that, for example, turning people into property based on race was not racist? If so, I don't think there's much point in a discussion here.
For those more reasonable who want to know about what anti-racism is opposed to, I'd suggest reading Loewen's Sundown Towns, Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, and Mills's The Racial Contract as beginner-friendly looks at the system of racism, its historical and intellectual roots, and how it all played out historically.
Did I say that? Reply to what I say, not words you create. The system was created long before the US.
Many people were involved in this system, from the warring tribes in Africa selling prisoners, to countries like the UK setting up colonies with slaves for cotton, tobacco, etc.
We were the colony that finally stopped the system. It took a long time and a lot of blood because it was the system, but it was ended.
If your point is that the US didn't invent racism, I agree. Again, read Kendi, who traces its roots back pretty well. But that doesn't mean the US wasn't hugely racist both during its colonial period and long after. And again, if that's something that you can't see, I'm not sure what the point of further discussion is.
> Your theory is that, for example, turning people into property based on race was not racist? If so, I don't think there's much point in a discussion here.
Given that the enslaved had been so subjugated by others of the very same race, how could the institution itself possibly be called essentially racist?
I can only hope you're trolling here. But on the off chance that is a sincere question, maybe read the books I recommended.
Or if you'd like a quick answer from the Confederacy's Vice President, you might read the Cornerstone Speech, which includes these words: "Our new government['s]...foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
If you're having trouble seeing the racism there, I'm not sure how else I could help.
You quote the Cornerstone Speech correctly, which was a post-hoc rationalization, a propaganda effort to encourage millions of fighting age men to lay down their lives for an economic system that was based on slavery which, I've already proven, was not an essentially racist institution.
Remind me again, in the US, how many white people were sold in to chattel slavery?
If even you could somehow make a convincing argument that the pre-war system was not inherently racist (which you cannot), the post-war system of neoslavery would put the final nail in that coffin.
> Remind me again, in the US, how many white people were sold in to chattel slavery?
Even an answer of zero doesn't address or contradict my original point.
There's no such thing as "neoslavery". Racism was certainly used after the war to reduce labor solidarity between the white working class and the newly-freed black laborers, however, that fact also doesn't address or contradict my original point.
You have proven no such thing, unless you're using some sort of definition of racism so outside the norm that either way it looks like a poor use of my time to try to explain your mistake to you.
Now this is the second time you're ignoring the context of the supply of the very slaves being discussed, so I determine that you are not discussing honestly.
> Speak for yourself, not everybody. If anything we were the colony to finally collapse the system after many centuries of it being standard across the world.
USA was very late ending slavery, most European countries had already outlawed it long before the American civil war. USA was the colony that required a war to stop treating people like cattle, that is its history.
> we were the colony to finally collapse the system after many centuries of it being standard across the world.
That is blatantly false. That was my point. You are right the Europeans weren't angels, but you were absolutely wrong there, America was the colony that was dragged kicking and screaming to abolish slavery long after everyone else had already done so, it absolutely wasn't the colony that finally collapsed the system of slavery it was pushed by everyone else to end it and then still had to go through a civil war doing it.
The American colonies supplied the Brits with cotton. The system was setup to do so by UK. UK was buying the slave picked cotton well after they abolished/outsourced slavery.
The UK even continued slavery in Indian colonies until 1843. They only abolished sugar plantations because it was not profitable anymore.
If the American colonies didn't rebel from the UK, they may have not abolished the cotton plantations themselves because they highly depended on it.
The US didn't "actually" abolish slavery until the 1940s. This is only partially your fault for not knowing, the US school system turns a blind eye to neoslavery in the post war era with the technicality that slavery is still legal for prisoners and that pretty much any crime could lead you to be enslaved in the south if you were the incorrect race.
Unless it's 100% remote without any video conferencing, it would be a little hard not know race. The point is being forced to track it by self reporting they can't hide their racism. In this case they're asking about education status, marital status, whether you have kids and a zillion other (mostly protected) statuses. Protected ones you're not allowed to discriminate... now if you have a weird accent or bad fashion sense, likely allowed to discriminate.
> So which report makes an organization less racist:
> Org A) 10% of applicants are brown, 9% of hires are brown
That means nearly all brown applicants for got hired. You're probably thinking this is a "good stat" and therefore a "good employer". But what if the rest of that company's stats were "90% of applicants are white, 80% of hires are white." Is that still a "good stat/good company"? According to you, it should be (and I would tend to agree.) In both cases, we're pretty much showing "If you apply for a job here, you have a ~90% chance of getting in, regardless of skin color." Not bad!!
But wait. What if the demographic of applicants is more like 50% white and 50% brown. (Assume a non-remote workplace). Now, one has to wonder why, in a demographic where half the population is brown, why only 10% are applying to this organization? Could be many reasons. Culturally, maybe the brown folds simply choose not to apply here. Or maybe the organization has a history of mistreating brown folks, abusing them, paying them less, etc. That could explain the low rate of applicants here. Your good example of a "less racist" org doesn't look so good anymore. Many factors could be a play; some less intentionally-evil than others. Hard to draw conclusions simply by reporting on one stat in isolation.
> Hard to fix what you don't measure.
Yes, but harder to think critically about the data you do gather.
> That means nearly all brown applicants for got hired.
Nope, the denominator is different. If you select the same percentage from each category the proportions stay the same.
If there are 100 fruits where 10 are apples and 90 are pears and each fruit has 10% chance to be selected then you get on average 1 apple and 9 pears => 10% of the selected fruits are apples.
"So which report makes an organization less racist"
So that implies that org B is more racist(because it hired zero brown people) - is that not the conclusion the author of the comment wants us to reach?
If your company takes a pile of CVs and randomly picks a bunch of people to hire, then yes, you are absolutely correct, there is something very very wrong with company B if a truly random process results in an unequal distribution of hires.
But hiring isn't random. Maybe all the "brown" candidates lacked necessary qualifications. Or needed visas which they couldn't get. Or a million other reasons other than "org B is racist".
My point is: you need further context. To look at that one stat as given above and conclude org B is racist is....unwise.
If they get inspected, accused in media, or sued, they can readily show that they actually employ some percentage of whatever minorities. I think there's no other practical reason.
There is a lot of secondary information that could allow unconscious or conscious bias to slip into the hiring process, e.g. Name discrimination [1]
Ideally the race information you input would only be given to HR and not shown to anyone involved in the hiring process. It would then be used to identify anomalies indicative of bias occurring.
There is an extremely long and brutal history of systemic bias against groups people who look a certain way. Pretending it must have stopped and is now no more worthy of societal introspection than blondes vs. brunettes is laughable to me.
It's not "pretending it must have stopped" it's "stopping it by making it impolite to mention". It used to be OK to make dumb blonde jokes, or (more severely) to be openly antisemitic, or to discriminate against redheads due to perceived Irish ancestry. Yet these are considered in poor taste today. No affirmative action was undertaken on behalf of blondes or Jews or Irish people. We just realized it's in poor taste to make distinctions about people with regards to their superficial characteristics and a few generations passed.
I'm just suggesting we let this same process unfold naturally. And that affirmative action, by placing emphasis on superficial differences between people, takes us in the wrong direction.
Detecting/combatting instances of racial bias and affirmative action are not the same thing, in fact it's basically the opposite in that's it's eliminating actions that disproportionately benefit one racial group over another.
I don't doubt that some companies use this data to drive quotas but that isn't something inherent to collecting and analyzing race/gender info in hiring.
On top of that, something being impolite to mention doesn't mean it's not driving discrimination.
Right but we didn't have to do any of this measuring for Jewish, Chinese, Italian, or Irish people. Yet discrimination against these groups has markedly improved over time. This happens naturally as people mix together and realize they're not so different, and as older generations die. This integration process naturally deemphasizes superficial differences.
You seem to be avoiding the question. This process clearly works, and doesn't require any metrics collection or monitoring. Furthermore, DEI initiatives are clearly harmful to organizational goals[1] and clearly disenfranchise people who are just interested in colour-blindly carrying on with their work. Why do we need them?
PS. I'm hoping to preempt a no true Scotsman style reply about DEI. The example below was undertaken at a major corporation with the world-class consultants.
> You seem to be avoiding the question. This process clearly works, and doesn't require any metrics collection or monitoring.
Across what time scale? Exactly how long is acceptable to you to wait as things work themselves out? Surely 400 years would have been enough time for this to really kick in.
> PS. I'm hoping to preempt a no true Scotsman style reply about DEI
I'm not defending DEI as practiced, I'm merely defending the idea that 1) racial discrimination in hiring happens, and 2) it's possible to do stuff about it faster than letting this work out "naturally".
I'd say ~80 years is about an appropriate amount of time. It's about how long it took antisemitism, anti-Irish and anti-Italian sentiment to die out. No amount of metrics will change the minds of adults who grew up in "a different time". Your only option is to wait for them to die.
> it's possible to do stuff about it faster
My point is that by attempting to address the concern faster than "naturally" you are almost certainly prolonging the "natural" time actual integration takes.
There's all sorts of regulation around this as well. If a person walks into a bank to apply for a home loan and they do not wish to provide their race, the banking associate has to make a guess.
Inquiry - how having this data proves that they do such a thing? Maybe none of the black applicants had necessary qualifications?
To answer your question - if there is such a complaint made, I'd appoint another qualified hiring manager(or HR person) to sit in on any future interviews with this person and give me their report on the situation.
....the same way any other complaint is made? If you think you have been discriminated against when interviewing you'd complain to your local department of labour or equivalent, they would then bring it up with the company and it would have to be investigated.
Because those numbers are reported to the government. And if the government sees that your company of 1000 people located in Texas has 1 hispanic person and 999 white people (among which are only 2 women), the government is going to start asking some questions.
Tl;dr: it is less about the company being less racist on their own by knowing the race, it is more about the company having to report those numbers so that others could hold them accountable (in case there are any arising concerns about racism).
The US federal government doesn't proactively start asking such questions of employers. They only act on potential civil rights violations in response to a credible formal complaint.
Thanks for clarifying, makes sense. Ultimately that demographic data gathered from employees helps the federal government with legitimizing those formal complaints, acting as potential supporting evidence.
A lot of it has to do with population statistics, for better or for worse the USA is fixated on having available data on all racial discrimination (make sense given the history of the country). I do agree that the categories them selves need some revision, however, unlike the forms here at genders.wtf, you can usually opt out of answering the racial category, which makes it infinitely better.
Most of the time it does NOT mean skin color. Otherwise 'caucasian' wouldn't be there, a lot of latinos (or at least Brazilians) would be 'white' too, my wife (who basically reflects light) and myself included.
By the US federal definition, a lot of latinos are white. Hispanic/Latino is classified as an "ethnicity" not a "race" so you can be e.g. white/latino or native-american/latino
> Hispanic/Latino is classified as an “ethnicity” not a “race”
Hispanic/Latino (and not-Hispanic/Latino) are the only ethnicities in that context, and it exists specifically to enable categorization that reflects the social construction of Whiteness at the time it was created while not obviously breaking the (bogus, in any case) biological rationale for the construction of “racial” categories, which is why most categorizations of data using that ethnicity treat Hispanic/Latino as another bucket alongside the racial buckets, from which everything of either White or every race (usage differs) is transferred if Hispanic/Latino ethnicity is also indicated, leaving the effected race buckets with only the non-Hispanic/Latino elements.
Don't they call you "white hispanic"? As far as I know they just have white, black, native american and asian in the main race categories, then you might add "hispanic black" or "hispanic white" to those two, but hispanic isn't a separate category.
Brazilians don't really associate themselves with the term "hispanic" given the country was colonized by Portugal, not Spain... and it's hard to argue the term is a drop-in replacement for "Latin American" when Brazil represents ~50% of LatAm population
I'm talking about how USA sees race and the forms you fill in there, not reality of human ancestry. USA has a very antiquated view on race, but that is the legal definition so that is what we talk about when we are talking about race with respect to US employment laws.
Hard to be hispanic when I'm 50% German, 25% Italian, 25% Portuguese (in terms of my grandparents/grand-grandparents). Where I'm from in Brazil, it's very common for people to be eligible for getting Italian and German citizenships (wife and myself included)
I'm in Canada, which I think it's similar. I'm not sure, but I would guess yes, because Latinos are considered PoC, independently of actual skin colour, AFAIK. If I say to anyone that I'm white, they'll think I'm wrong, because of accent+name
It sounds more and more like in the US (and, perhaps, in Canada too) people are being divided into essentially 2 categories: white and non-white. But to complicate things, people with identical ancestry and of identical skin color can be considered white or non-white based on the country of their birth.
Meanwhile, us Slavs, who were genocided 80 years ago for not being ‘Aryan’ enough, and not even considered ‘white’ 100 years ago are lumped in with WASPs…
I’m committed to anti racism but the US approach is charlatanism all the way down. The esteemed Dr King and Mr X would be rolling in their graves.
You should know that anti-racism means a specific thing, it's been co opted by a certain ideology. The rest of your comment attests that you do not ascribe to that ideology so you may want to update your nonclem to just "against racism"
Technically there are more options, I agree. Practically very often these options are divided into whites (includes Asians) and people of color (includes Latinos but blacks have priority).
> Most of the time in the US race means skin color.
No, it doesn’t. In fact, most of the time in the US, “skin color” is code for race/ethnicity. Light-skinned Black people, White non-Hispanics, mostly-White Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians can have very similar or even identical literal skin colors; but the Black person is still Black, the Whites are still White (except maybe the Hispanic ones), and the rest are neither White nor Black.
I don't mean to be rude, but I suspect by "MLK's values" you mean the sentence "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." as interpreted to mean support for racial neutrality and opposition to the use of racial categories in programmatic decision making.
It's fine for that to be the thing you believe in, but that is not a reasonable interpretation of "MLK's values". MLK scholars, his contemporaries he worked with, and his successors within his organizations would nearly categorically reject your characterization of that being his values. Like this is an entire area of academic study: what MLK said, thought, and wanted done.
Again, it's fine to conclude that MLK has it wrong and the left is wrong about race and social justice warriors etc. etc. etc. I don't think you should be made to care about what MLK thought or to study him. I am not interested in telling you you are right or wrong about any policy issue. It's just incredibly flip to engage so superficially with a guy who left such a voluminous archive of writing and thought and use him as a prop in the argument. I think if you are going to assert yourself as understanding what his values were, you owe it to him to spend a lot more time and effort trying to understand what they were.
This is sort of the equivalent of thinking you understand Nietzsche to be anti-religious because you half-remember the quote "God is dead" and although you've never read him you feel confident you know what it means.
You apparently have never read or listened to more than the "I have a dream" speech. King was very much about anti-racism, which is best termed "anti-racism". It's not sufficient to not add racism to the world, you should seek to counter it. And no, that's not the same thing as being racist in another direction. If you can't tell the difference, maybe you should go study what MLK actually said.
On the other hand, King's notorious speech sounds absolutely nothing like Kendi or other current anti-racists, so evidently there's quite a gap between the two stances, and it's dishonest to deny it.
That speech is just one of many. But anyway, MLK was at the forefront of anti-racism 60 years ago; it would be more alarming if there weren't a gap between him and the current vanguard.
Curious why you described the speech as “notorious” rather than “famous”?
Why are you conflating interpersonal racism with systemic? Both exist. If a white person is racist towards a black person do you call that racial bias? If you do, you are just replacing the established definition of racism, not addressing the phenomenon itself.
Because the suffix "ism" doesn't really refer to interpersonal things. It connotes a system.
Some may not agree with the distinction, but the reality that racial bias without power and a system behind it is not really the same thing. Which is why there is not equivalent to things like the "n" word for white people.
I don't know that I agree with everything you're trying to get at, but shouldn't it just be called "racism". The term reverse-racism seems nonsensical. The term itself seems racist, implying that you can't be racist toward certain races. You can only be "reverse-racist".
"Racism" can mean interpersonal ("I don't like black people") or it can mean systemic ("society disadvantages black people"), and lots of people in social studies focus on the latter. Because there's not really any systemic disadvantage to being white, that focus on the latter effectively defines racism against white people as non-existent (there's not systemic racism against white people, so there's not "racism" against white people). Given that, "racism against white people" is definitionally not "racism", hence "reverse racism".
Of course there are multiple steps in there which can be criticized, but within the set of terms they've defined, it makes the language less ambiguous. It's like how astronomy often defines "metals" as "anything bigger than helium". The terms have a useful meaning in the proper context.
Racism by default means interpersonal racism. That’s why when we talk about systemic racism we add this qualifier.
There might not be systemic anti-white racism in the US but there is certainly interpersonal racism against whites in the US. Insisting on dismissing that is not helpful to literally anyone: whites or people of color.
Which of MLK's values did we once hold that we've now abandoned?
Anti capitalism and pro economic redistribution?
> The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power. [1]
That white people should radically support racial justice?
> I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice. [2]
That riots are understandable in the face of oppression?
> But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?...It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity. [3]
The fact is that MLK was a radical who was opposed by most white people. When he died, 75% of the American public disliked him. It's only in retrospect that conservatives have tried to whitewash his legacy, pretending to support racial progress while opposing the very things he stood for.
“I have a Dream” was delivered to an audience of a quarter million and televised to millions more and has continued to be a cornerstone of public school education at least where I grew up where we would listen to the audio and later stream the video. That’s the breakthrough hit.
We don’t treasure everything even about the people we like. MLK was a man, and therefore it is safe to assume a complicated person who developed and changed his beliefs a lot throughout his life. When he seized the opportunity to deliver a speech to the nation, it wasn’t “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and it wasn’t sympathy for rioters, it was “I Have a Dream”.
Do you see the implications of what you’re saying? The reason that speech is cherry-picked to be the cornerstone of public school education — the reason it’s the “breakthrough hit” — is that it allows people to avoid confronting the radical and uncomfortable aspects of MLK’s demands.
This is an example of survivorship bias. MLK obviously didn’t anticipate when he made the “I Have A Dream” speech that he would have only a few more years to live. It’s seen as representative not because he thought it was a unique opportunity to make an impact, but because it’s what people chose to highlight once he was gone.
> Do you see the implications of what you’re saying?
Yes.
> The reason that speech is cherry-picked to be the cornerstone of public school education — the reason it’s the “breakthrough hit” — is that it allows people to avoid confronting the radical and uncomfortable aspects of MLK’s demands.
Sure it’s cherry picked, but it was also the message he delivered with the most weight to the largest audience with the largest resonance to that audience that we valued enough to continue carrying forward.
We don’t carry forward every message by every person, and we don’t carry forward every message for every person we do carry messages forward for. This was what he had to say that we valued the most.
> This is an example of survivorship bias. MLK obviously didn’t anticipate when he made the “I Have A Dream” speech that he would have only a few more years to live.
It’s not just survivorship bias though. This was the culmination of the March on Washington. It was kind of a big deal. You have the biggest live audience you can ever expect to have in your lifetime, even if you’re Martin Luther King Jr, so what do you think he should have said instead with the fantastic advantage of hindsight that you possess? Nowadays we can post on YouTube and get tens of thousands of hits every day as long as we’re better than mediocre. Limited opportunities for engagement force you to focus on what you think is most important to say at that moment.
> Sure it’s cherry picked, but it was also the message he delivered with the most weight to the largest audience with the largest resonance to that audience that we valued enough to continue carrying forward.
I agree, but I don’t think it reflects particularly well on the audience! Like, carry this one step further. Why is this the message that resonated with everyone? Why not white moderates being the stumbling block to racial justice, or capitalism being evil?
I’ll give you a hint: it’s not because people actually want or care about racial equality.
> You have the biggest live audience you can ever expect to have in your lifetime, even if you’re Martin Luther King Jr, so what do you think he should have said instead with the fantastic advantage of hindsight that you possess?
I have to imagine that, had he seen this future, he would not have said the line about judging people by the content of their character, because the result has been the co-opting of his image to undermine everything he stood for. Like, people will literally use that quote to argue that MLK would have opposed affirmative action, when the exact opposite is true.
> I agree, but I don’t think it reflects particularly well on the audience! Like, carry this one step further. Why is this the message that resonated with everyone? Why not white moderates being the stumbling block to racial justice, or capitalism being evil?
I can think of several reasons:
1. It was sincere.
2. It was likely the only speech anyone had ever seen from MLK, statistically speaking. It’s not like they were serialized.
3. It was correct. If we are to judge people at all, we should do so on the basis of their character, not the color of the skin. One takes consideration and trust in one’s own judgment, the other you only need at least one working eye for.
4. It was non-confrontational: “I have a Dream” not “I have a Problem”.
5. It was the culmination of the 1963 March on Washington. Marching on Washington wasn’t exactly a common affair back then: it drew attention, as it was designed to.
6. It was the speech he chose to deliver to the largest audience he had ever had in his life and was likely to ever have as far as he knew. Basically in effect “do or die” for at least that set of participants. If it had been a failure, there were no take-backsies, no second chances, no just trying again next year. So the right message, at the right time, delivered to everyone he could to try and compel them to at least meet in the middle.
I mean, he could have said something else, but he also probably wouldn’t have been as effective and I probably wouldn’t have learned about him in school. Maybe you have a case to make that it would have been better that way.
> I have to imagine that, had he seen this future, he would not have said the line about judging people by the content of their character, because the result has been the co-opting of his image to undermine everything he stood for. Like, people will literally use that quote to argue that MLK would have opposed affirmative action, when the exact opposite is true.
Best line in the speech and you would want him to gut it! Who knows, maybe with foresight that matched your hindsight he would have. The problem isn’t that he said it, the problem you have is that people are citing that specific passage to make an argument about what his position would be.
He’s dead, and has been for a long time. He doesn’t have any arguments to make anymore, not against capitalism and not for affirmative action and not about how the moderate whites in his opinion just might on a bad day need some non-non-violent direct action shaped suspiciously like the good Reverend’s boot. The tradeoff against people misrepresenting his words to argue against something he probably would support decades into the future is that he got to be persuasive when he needed to be persuasive, but feel free to hop in the TARDIS and tell him that his needs at the time are less significant than your needs in the potential future. Only the living get to keep arguing, for everyone else the case is submitted.
I have a dream in which we are all marathon winners. We are done running. We have medals and confetti and cake. It’s a joyous time, and whether we finished the race in four hours or fourteen hours doesn’t matter, because we have all finished it. That’s my dream!
Right now, though, right now some of us are moving at a good pace, while others aren’t even moving in the right direction. Some of us are incapable of moving on our own. Others are being held back. Helping those who are struggling most right now makes sense, right?
You wouldn’t interrupt a marathon to object that encouraging the slowest runner isn’t fair, since the dream is for everybody to have a medal and cake.
Agreed. The dream is for everyone to have a medal and cake. Even for disadvantaged while people in the US, who are not “colonizers” or some lucky “white privilege” beneficiaries.
We need to track it in the US now because we _used_ to track it. If you spend 400 years tracking ethnicity to use for systematized oppression, you have to continue to record it for at least the next few generations just to measure your progress away from that system.
It's in part due to the diversity of people in the US, which has historically had 30% of the population who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Given everyone is at least a little racist at some point, the US encounters issues more often than the more homogeneous demographic countries.
Not the US. Just the far left of the spectrum that bought into Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi's brand of racism. There is a large majority of the US that would like for nothing better than to stop talking about it but the left is really loud.
This is very strange to me too. Election exit polls are broken up by race, as well as most other statistics. It's such a ubiquitous case of institutional racism no one in the US even thinks of it as such, apparently.
The US has a fairly recent and abhorrent collection of very undeniable racist policies including outright slavery, Jim Crow laws, and redlining. There are ongoing repercussions from just these issues, ignoring any other institutional racist laws/policies that may or may not still exist.
No doubt the US has more of a history with deep racial division than most other western democracies.
But is the race of someone voting really useful, or is it just a fairly good proxy for other demographics. And at what point does this use of race as a demographic in itself become a societal pressure for blacks, latinos, asians etc to fit into certain stereotypes?
In my circles there was a lot of reaction, as it seemed to be a Freudian slip as to how racist the man is. It's seemed instead the media rather wanted to protect him for some post-trumpian political reason.
Trying to interpret a word transposition from a senile old man in any direction at all is just kind of sad, in my view.
But of course, some people are so coddled by modernity and their social media bubbles that they implicitly think racism is all about choice of vocabulary or other completely superficial things.
Well, it's interesting that this is such a ubiquitous thing in the US, and so uncommon elsewhere. It's not an uncommon view in sociology that this can be self-perpetuating, though I could go both ways on this myself.
This preoccupation with race as a demographic discriminant is pretty uncommon in Europe.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. You want to change race, that's why you track it? Or you want to change how racial "groups" vote? The logic makes sense in some contexts, but not all, and not the one I was referring to anyway.
It just seems like a horrible practice to me because the fact that 1930s Germany tracked Jewish people and allowed them to kill so many.
If we could guarantee that another genocidal dictator won't come to power then I might be OK with it. Couple that tracking with the surveillance and one might be able to ensure few slip through the cracks.
The answer is there are no good reasons, but one cycle goes like this:
1. HR gets asked by their employees for statistics on how many non-binary/PoC/women/<insert your label here> people in the organization are represented in management/executive/engineering/<insert your probably under-represented role here>.
2. The org at first responds "We don't know because we don't collect this data".
3. The question-askers respond "How convenient, that's because you know they're under-represented".
4. Company responds with typical "meritocracy" answer, then eventually launches long, drawn-out process because hey, "we're a data driven organization!"
5. Years later, after the original question-asker is long gone they share the data, ideally after a few cycles that show <current under-represented individuals> have grown from small percentage of total to slightly larger small percentage. Company loudly boasts on all social media platforms about wokeness and snowflake status.
6. Times change and society moves on, leading to questions of "why does the company care if I'm <whatever, it's now a non-event, progress!>"
7. Employees respond with lack of giving a sh!t or manufacture false outrage at the violation of their personal privacy.
8. the cycle continues, while data deteriorates, leading to some pretty hilarious options in drop-downs.
Many things have "reporting requirements" where, for example, your employer is required to report your gender and race to the government to determine how sexist and racist they are.
I suspect it's very rarely actually important, it's just on the list of things they always have asked for and always will.
Diversity numbers show up on reports that affect ESG investment. ESG funds will buy more of your company’s stock if you have a higher percentage of women on boards, for example, and other metrics.
And some positions are only offered to diverse candidates or candidates from a particular subgroup, like LGBT etc. Last year, one of the roles I had to fill was diverse-only. Only applicants of color were allowed to apply for the role.
Not really, it seems like the poster's own grievances about ESG. I've been asked these questions at every job I've ever had, and that preceded ESG by decades...
I wish people here could use reasonable judgment instead of a kind of judgment that reflects "something is possibly true technically, but not really realistic, but I'm going to treat as true anyway because it runs against a mainstream/political narrative so someone rebut me"
> ESG funds will buy more of your company’s stock if you have a higher percentage of women on boards, for example, and other metrics.
This is as close to a neutral and objective description of ESG as could be written in English! That is not grievance, and it should not be downvoted as such.
Yeah, that is a neutral description of it. My issue wasn't the description of ESG, but the conclusions drawn about how ESG is driving things (which I pointed out, significantly predated ESG) thats exactly the point I'm making about being obtuse for no reason at all. It's abundantly clear from my post that my issue is the conclusions the poster drawn about how ESG drives things, and not the poster's description of ESG on its own. Yet you are apparently under the belief pointing this out rebuts me? That's not reasonable at all.
It is not being downvoted because of the description, it is being downvoted because of the conclusions drawn about ESG which are baseless and easily discounted by anyone's personal experience in the business world prior to like, 2 years ago when it became a buzzterm. This has been explained to you twice yet you are pretending to be so obtuse as to not understand why the post is validly being downvoted. The only thing that is bad faith is you continuing to engage in this conversation with me while not putting any effort in to actually grok what is being discussed.
Oh, I'm sure violations happen all the time. But I very much doubt such violations primarily benefit minorities. There's a reason these laws exist, after all. Further, "blatantly violating" these laws as a publicly traded company, to game ESG funds seems like a poor risk:reward gamble.
If violations to improve ESG score are a poor risk:reward gamble, what are the rewards of these other violations that "happen all the time"? Are the rewards even greater than improvement of ESG score?
1. The types of companies ESG funds can invest in (publicly traded companies) probably aren't very likely to blatantly violate any laws. There are significant repercussions for such behavior. With privately held companies, there's a lot more room to work in shady nonsense like we're discussing in part because there's so much less oversight.
2. I can at least point to plenty of evidence that this happens. Take this 2021 UC Berkeley Study [1] showing that job applicants with black-sounding names were significantly less likely to get called back than applicants with white-sounding names. What's the motivation there? Good ol' fashioned racism. Y'know, the exact motivation that prompted the laws in question to be written.
As I mentioned in a different comment, gender might be necessary for the feature of displaying content that addresses you, since some languages have gender baked in, there is no genderless 'you' form like in English.
However, in most applications and services, this is not used like that. The gender mapping seems to be used exclusively to determine whether the marketing emails should start with "mr." or "mrs.".
> The gender mapping seems to be used exclusively to determine whether the marketing emails should start with "mr." or "mrs.".
Anything vaguely social is going to have instances where you want to refer to a user in the third person.
Of course, an easy solution to this is not to ask for gender per se, but for what pronouns to use. Even a dropdown with "he/she/they" options is going to cover basically everyone. If you need something more complicated than that, so be it, but probably YAGNI.
How so? Isn't it generally considered good UX design in most software not to front-load customization options before they're relevant to the user?
I want to think we've grown out of the early design era of launching an image editor and getting asked on first run what format I want to use for exporting images. Ask me that question when I hit the export button. Similarly, ask me questions about grammar when it's relevant to the software, don't ask me questions up front that might never be relevant to my use of the software.
As an analogy, imagine if you started using Bandcamp and it asked you up-front for tax information just in case you ever decided to publish an album in the future. If the user hasn't ever switched to a language that requires knowing what gender variants they use, then that question is just one additional tiny piece of signup friction sitting in front of your service that you could get rid of for the majority of your users.
My understanding is that asking the sexual orientation question is illegal at least in some states. Personally never been asked that by any employer in CA.
Interesting, looks like some sexual orientations fall into the “underrepresented community” definition. I wonder how the gauge this type of diversity. Would it be “sufficient” if half of the board are bisexual white men?
What I also find a bit strange is when people feel the need to tell you what their sexual orientation is, even though you didn't ask. What's also strange is when you consider what you would have to ask them to have them give you that as their answer.
And in some cases it could even be considered as sexual harassment.
Example: "I am lesbian" in other words means I'm sexually attracted and may or may not have sexual intercourse with another woman.
Now try to think of questions you would have to ask to receive the above as the answer.
Maybe it's just me, but unless asked, it feels very inappropriate to just tell people with whom you have sex or wish to have sex with. Especially when the topic of conversation was about something completely different and in no way related.
> I don't care about your gender or sexual orientation unless I want to have a sexual relationship with you.
I feel the same way and have never been able to get a good answer for this one. "Statistics and hiring" is a very lame-duck answer. How does it help our product knowing that we have +1 more homonormative person?
For healthcare, I think it makes a lot of sense, as diseases affect different genders differently. Also, those with certain sexual orientations are more prone to certain diseases. It's crucial to understand someone's gender, sexual activity, and even race to give them proper healthcare.
As a physician, I don't have to be gay in order to understand diseases that affect primarily gay communities, how those diseases spread, or how to treat them. There's a big difference between a group you study and a group you hire. The two groups can certainly overlap, but they don't have to.
Yes and no. There is also substantial proven bias in healthcare relating to gender and race.
Unfortunately, I think that's another reason we need to collect those statistics. Because if we can't measure the problem, we'll have a very hard time fixing it.
I'm not sure this counts as a bias in healthcare, but I remember reading a study that looked at a large walk-in clinic that served a diverse population. A patient on any given visit would be seen by whatever doctor was next available.
They found that patients were more likely to follow the doctor's instructions after they left the clinic if the doctor was the same race as the patient.
In a way, yes. The specific meaning of words here is important. Sex likely refers to primary sex characteristics and gender may refer to secondary sex characteristics. For example, breast cancer is not a high risk for men, but it is for trans women.
I've been asked on two job applications lately whether or not I'm "asexual". I'm not, but I'm appalled to be asked this in a professional setting. If I was, I'd also be appalled, if not seriously distraught.
I immediately dropped the applications. Perhaps screening out people like me was the real goal to begin with, and maybe it's a win-win after all.
Quite often, it seems, they ask to build your profile to sell to advertisers. As much as it would be great for everyone to be treated equally, our genders do affect the crap that we buy and advertisers often care about it.
But more broadly, finding trends/patterns really does come down to being able to sort people into different buckets. Especially now, with the push towards ML, you never know which feature will turn out to be significant, so the strategy ends up being to collect as much data as possible and let computers churn through it looking for patterns.
It would be tempting to ascribe a gender-specific motive to the collection of gender data just based on the significance that we feel towards gender. But I'm not sure those collecting it have those motivations. They're just sucking in everything that they can get away with in the hopes that some of it will prove valuable.
I don’t think it’s necessary in most cases, although oddly I recently had a medical insurance claim rejected because of a gender mismatch for my wife. (USA and all the health insurance mess)
Turns out that my employer deliberately doesn’t send gender to the insurance company. This means it defaults to male. A urologist appointment for kidney stones was then rejected by the insurer when it didn’t match the provider.
If this was an Ob/Gyn appointment that makes a little more sense, but kidney stones and urology in general are non-gendered. This was not the first claim either. Plenty of others were fine with other providers.
I can see gender being used sort of generically for fraud prevention in some cases. But, it’s a stretch to say it’s broadly useful.
In general now I lie on forms about as much as I can. At Panera Bread I was asked if I’m the CEO when my account came up first name Panera, last name Bread. There’s no reason for any personal data, so I don’t give it.
Gathering this by employers is part of US federal law. It is also passed to your insurer, and used to do... insurance things invisibly.
Gathering this by companies is so they can better profile you and serve you tailored content (as defined by them.) E.g. If you respond "Man", they might want to send you fewer ads for tampons and more ads for razors or whatever. Note, I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's the reasoning.
Ideally/ostensibly, this data collection is helpful for accountability, at the company level and also entities like Labor Dept. statistics. The concern is that companies who strive to be colorblind and non-discriminatory in their hiring don't end up that way in reality. And that assessment is impossible without some effort at data collection.
Sad but true. Which begs the question, if they're inclusive of a certain race and gender, are they exclusive of others?
This whole agenda towards absolute equality in all aspects of life is ridiculous. Why settle for race and gender? Let's make sure we have equal amounts of people by eye and hair color, height, weight, or any other criteria. Doing anything less is surely discriminatory.
It sounds like you are unfamiliar with the concept of a protected class. Those characteristics that are protected by (US) law are generally the ones that companies focus on in this kind of data collection.
So rest assured, companies won't treat chin diameter the same way they treat race and gender in an imagined "agenda towards absolute equality in all aspects of life".
What would be correct, though? I don't think "It's not important" is really a satisfactory answer. There are many scenarios in which a site might want to personalize content for a voluntarily submitted gender preference. One example might be a site for people who want to have a sexual relationship with someone else.
Most of these questions are about identities that have sometimes been discriminated against (intentionally or unintentionally). The reason for asking is to make sure that the process is reaching the people it's supposed to. Like, if you're running a vaccine clinic that is intended for everyone, but women don't feel comfortable going there, you'd like know that's happening so you can dig into why.
As people have mentioned, this applies to hiring -- but at the top of the funnel in who your posts are reaching/motivating, not just at the end for diversity stats.
To your point, we don't usually ask for similar information like blood type in online forms. In the past, single/married was much more frequently asked. Are we at the point where gender is heading the same direction? For signing up for a library card or a Netflix account, no. But it depends on the context.
I don't think salutations seriously matter in most (English-speaking) countries. Even in professional settings, I receive emails that address me by my first name.
Even still, if you must record the relevant salutations, you can ask for the salutation to use rather than the gender or sex.
It doesn't matter for English website because you usually send out emails with "Hi Joe".
Once you internationalize you will need this because in German it's an absolute no go to address a stranger by their first name (at least for B2B services).
And internationalization is on the road map for a lot of companies.
Huh I didn’t know that! So does it mean that websites internationalize even the salutations? Do they replace “Hi Joe” with “Good day Mr. Brown” in Germany?
It depends. If it started in an english speaking country, then more than likely not for a long time. If it started in a germanic one, it'd almost 100% be the last name.
It has less to do with where it started and more with the language and what field the business is operating in.
I was working for a UK steel supplier and they would address all their email recipients with their first name. We had to change this when internationalizing into German. If you want to sell to Germans you are much safer to use a more formal tone.
Slightly related to that is the formal and informal you that exists in a lot of languages.
I was also working for a German fashion startup mostly targeted at young women. In German it was fine to address everyone by first name and the informal you, but when translated the page to French, we could keep the first name but had to change the informal you to the formal one.
You may wanna read up on honorifics [0]. That stuff is cultural and you'll be persevered as unprofessional or even non-trustworthy by failing to properly use it.
Devil's advocate: They'll also "survive" being "misgendered." Maybe embarrassing/rude event, to be avoided if possible, but not everything has to be "systemic -ism."
Many of the examples on that website are not from English-speaking countries. "diverse" and "female doctor" are typically German, and "male" = "bad" was likely mistranslated from Italian (or another Latin language)
A very similar thing is asking for your feedback on every second page of the website, and then forwarding it straight into /dev/null. It's because once you shared it via their website, you will be less inclined to go post a (possibly damaging) opinion elsewhere. Your instinct to be heard has been satisfied, and the chance of a negative review visible to others has decreased by N%, which is still good enough for "economies of scale".
Similarly, HRs have somehow collectively figured out that if you nudge people to self-express by stuffing their gender issues into the peers' faces, they will be less likely to self-express by demanding better salary, scheduling, working conditions, etc. It organically grew from the "employee of the month" bullshit and other "trinkets in lieu of a raise" programs, and is now reaching completely ridiculous levels. Hopefully, the rising inflation will give people a more tangible problem to solve, and we will see more focus on things like quality of life, affording kids, retirement perspectives, and so on.
As a trans person I hate all half-assed inclusion measures, on top of the fact if I point this stuff out I sound like one of the 'bad ones'. It just made everything confusing whether it is asking for sex or gender. Medical stuff sure I'll disclose everything cause it's relevant to me getting good service. However, there are so many companies that want to just obviously use the info for ad revenue... What features are you bringing me that are improved cause you know my sex? What features are you bringing me that are improved cause you know I'm trans?
Huh, yeah, good point. "So you can better manipulate me into buying stuff" is a really non-compelling reason for me to give you sensitive personal information.
> A filter list by garment type that lets you filter out dresses and blouses?
That's ridiculous. You're making things a thousand times more complicated for no good reason besides ideological performance. It reminds me of how, in ancient China, once a new emperor was crowed, everyone was supposed to stop using the characters in his name in written documents (i.e. re-spelled a bunch of stuff).
Classical gender is actually a pretty good solution to a lot of practical problems.
> You're making things a thousand times more complicated for no good reason besides ideological performance.
Cool, I had no idea you were able to peer inside my brain and tease out my inner thought process. Thank you for explaining to me that I didn't actually think the idea through and am just operating on what you classify as "ideology".
It's strange because I thought I just wanted to be able to find what I want. Like, if I want a blouse, I want to filter for blouses. If I want a t-shirt, I want to filter for that.
I thought that I thought that searching by sex is just a proxy for what I'm actually trying to find and that providing more granular filter options, and more accurate descriptive data about garments that could be used for searching and so forth, that a shopping service would be more useful, not less.
But, hey, you obviously know me better than I do, so my bad.
>> You're making things a thousand times more complicated for no good reason besides ideological performance.
> Cool, I had no idea you were able to peer inside my brain and tease out my inner thought process. Thank you for explaining to me that I didn't actually think the idea through and am just operating on what you classify as "ideology".
I don't need to peer inside your brain to understand your proposal makes things far more complicated for me, and there's no reason to drop classical gender as a classification except for ideological reasons.
> It's strange because I thought I just wanted to be able to find what I want. Like, if I want a blouse, I want to filter for blouses. If I want a t-shirt, I want to filter for that.
And if you pair this with dropping gender as a classification (the context of this thread), now you're expecting people to be very familiar with a lot of clothing jargon, so they can use that jargon as a proxy for gender. An even then, it breaks down. For instance: men's and women's t-shirts are typically not interchangeable.
It's also an idea that is over-optimized for a particular kind of online search, and breaks down for physical retail (in more than one way).
There's nothing wrong with adding the criteria you propose to a classification system that includes classical gender, and it would be a great improvement, but it's not a substitute for gender.
> there's no reason to drop classical gender as a classification except for ideological reasons.
Good thing I never suggested that.
Go back and look.
I never once suggested those things should be exclusive of one another.
> And if you pair this with dropping gender as a classification (the context of this thread)
Again: I never said that. In fact, no one in the thread I was responding to suggested that.
Go read from the beginning as it seems you've let your own ideology get in the way of your reading comprehension.
It all started with AnEro objecting to being asked about their gender.
Counttheforks agreed with them, saying it would be more inclusive to not ask users for that kind of sensitive personal information.
deelowe then asked "What should the option be when I'm searching for clothes and I want to filter out dresses and blouses?".
Counttheforks provided an excellent suggestion that involves classifying the type of clothing rather than asking for personal information about the user and then inferring what they're trying to do.
I suggested another alternative involving filtering by garment type/style. Those suggestions are certainly complementary and in fact countthefork's suggestion specifically mentions gendered styles as one way to classify garments.
All of this would improve the shopping experience while simultaneously making that experience more inclusive and not violating individual privacy.
Look, I understand, you apparently see culture wars everywhere. But if you wanna have that fight, you can do it with someone else.
> Sorry, that's not really true. Upthread, there's this:
>>> What would an acceptable inclusion measure be?
>> Not asking.
Yeah.
Not asking about the user's gender, not the gendered style of the products they're searching for.
Do you really not see the distinction?
Here, let me clarify: If I was a trans man, this is the difference between telling the website I'm a trans man, versus searching the website for clothing styled for men.
The objection was about the former, not the latter.
Want proof? Here's AnEro's actual comment, which it appears you didn't actually read:
> What features are you bringing me that are improved cause you know my sex? What features are you bringing me that are improved cause you know I'm trans?
(emphasis mine)
> Followed by a whole lot of discussion about finding clothes by using classifications other than gender.
Yeah, because that's the question that was asked.
AnEro asked "What features are you bringing me that are improved cause you know I'm trans".
In response, deelowe asked "What should the option be when I'm searching for clothes and I want to filter out dresses and blouses?".
We answered that specific question with some alternatives ways to achieve that same endgoal that doesn't require the website to ask for the user's gender.
Let me filter by style, waist, hip and in-seam. Frankly, that'd be a hell of a lot more useful. Maybe I'd actually be able to buy something that fits...
That's why I mentioned measurements not vanity sizes. Give me waist, hip, and in-seam in centimeters or inches and let me filter by picking ranges. That's infinitely more useful than gendered S/M/L "sizes".
Vanity sizing means the items is listed as a smaller size than it truly is, changing the units doesn't change anything. They can still say its 28" when its really 30".
Oh I’m aware, they just don’t need to exist. I wear both men’s and women’s shirts, and dresses and pants and skirts and whatever I want and they all fit me just fine. That’s the point I’m trying to make, it’s a false binary
I think "asking for pronouns" as that user mentions seems like a reasonable place to land. It has a clear potential use, and isn't confusing about what it is asking.
If no one was asking in the first place, no one would be left out. There are obviously places where it's relevant to ask, in which case, an open text field with no list of "normal" options should be sufficient.
Before I respond to your post, I need you to fill out this questionnaire so I can correctly tailor my post to your identity:
* Race
* Gender
* Sex
* Age
* Eye color
* Breast size
* Size of reproductive organ
Wouldn't want to accidentally be prejudiced! So, to make sure my reply is fully-inclusive, please let me know this information. Thanks.
---
Please don't actually do that. My point is to demonstrate that you can be perfectly non-prejudiced without obsessing over race and gender. And once you start that obsession, it looks a hell of a lot like you are prejudiced.
Pronouns if you don't need gender/ads but want a personal experience, then add gender for ad stuff and disclose it, if you don't need sex. Use modern terms where sex is referring to biology and gender as identity. Just avoid labelling and getting personal information all together when ever possible. When they do label I want it to just be the scientific definitions to keep things standard.
Prefer not asking at all. If you have to ask then a free optional text field. If you cant clean the data, then have three options: Female, Male, Other (specify), picking “other” will add another optional free text field. That’s it.
I'm sort of not surprised it's gotten to this point. In the early era of companies coming out to show their support, businesses wanted to show support in solidarity. The current state just feels like virtue signaling.
These are amusing, silly, embarrassing, cringey, and somewhat kind of sad.
I think (and kind of hope) that we might be slowly progressing towards an era where we stop discretizing gender into specific labels. The ever-growing number of labels suggests, to me at least, that we've got a wrong fit for the data type. I think it's rather simple: a multi-dimensional continuum of gender identity cannot be reduced to specific names. But that concept of "discrete gender" is very well-entrenched in society, so there's an attempt to make it fit by adding more discrete categories.
I'm not sure this is "wrong" given that I don't think society/culture/whatnot ever turns on a dime. But I don't think this represents a satisfactory state.
A good place to start is to stop asking for "gender" when it's completely unnecessary for whatever service is being offered. I think most websites don't need to. And if they're legally obligated in some way, that needs fixing.
...Am I making any sense? I'm having a moment of struggling to render my thoughts to words.
No, that makes total sense to me. My general feeling about gender is, "must we?" I just get exhausted at the insistence some have on dragging gender into everything.
I get that it was socially convenient (for some) to compress the multi-dimensional continuum into a binary. (Or in many other cultures, something more complicated.) But I think at this point we either add the extra bits or just stop fussing about it so much. Hopefully both.
That said, I think it's entirely possible to usefully reduce a multi-dimensional space to discrete labels without excessive harm. Look at the actual space we live in, for example. Naming places and regions can be both useful and helpful as long as we don't take the names too seriously. I suspect the same is true for the space of gender. But as with physical space, I'd rather let people self-organize and self-identify than for one group to try to impose their boundaries upon others.
As a geographer I completely appreciate the value of quantization. You’re right, it can be done and has value in the abstraction. Though it’s rarely free of issue, too. I’m thinking about border disputes. Gerrymandering. Square cows.
100% on your last point about self determination. If people want to define themselves, by all means!
What you've described is what most non-binary, trans, and many queer folks believe. (And many allies as well.)
The idea that there are "only two" genders is, imo, a bit of a 20th century lens, and I expect we'll move to disentangle gender from what anatomy do you have.
I agree that asking for gender is fraught. I am non-binary, and I constantly have to either lie or just choose "Not sharing". The best systems just take a string and leave it at that.
The only example here where I imagine a legitimate use case is the (Canada only) one, where some idiotic beaucracy is in place to handle folks who need to update gender on government identification (like passports)
1. diverse - This is likely German and standard on German gender selectors, it refers to anybody who identifies as neither male nor female.
2. Mrs Prof Dr. - Again this is likely German, and is not a gender selector, rather a title selector. It is standard in Germany to use both Prof and Dr titles, the Mrs then implies female. You wouldn't use it conversationally.
I (an American) joined a business call with some Germans and when they were speaking in German, they referred to each other as "Herr Müller" and "Frau Schmidt" then since I joined they switched to "Jens" and "Nadin." I just found that to be an interesting cultural difference.
That stuff is often strange in Germany. It's not uncommon to hear "Frau Müller, kannst Du mal ..." in professional environments where people know each other well ("Du" is informal and usually used with first names, formally it'd be "Frau Müller, können Sie", both is "Mrs Müller, could you" in English).
Gender != Chromosomal sex != Physiological sex != Hormonal sex != Gametes produced (gametic sex).
A man is most commonly (by percentage of total adult human population) an XY male, with a penis/testes, and produce sperm.
A woman is most commonly (by percentage of total adult human population) an XX female, with vulva/vagina/uterus/ovaries and breasts, and produce eggs. Older women (after menopause) no longer produce eggs and so have neuter gametic sex.
Pre-pubescent children don't produce gametes, and thus have neuter gametic sex.
A trans man is an XX female, possibly with surgical alterations to physiological sex, possibly with hormone replacement therapy to alter hormonal sex, and possibly (if either of the two former are present) with neuter gametic sex. Being a man does not require being male.
A trans woman is an XY male, possibly with surgical alterations to physiological sex, possibly with hormone replacement therapy to alter hormonal sex, and possibly (if either of the two former are present) with neuter gametic sex. Being a woman does not require being female.
Other combinations are possible.
Confusing gender with the various forms of sex and sex characteristics is unnecessary and causes confusion.
It is true that gender is distinct from sex. But "Physiological sex", "Gametic sex", and "Chromosomal sex" are all the same thing. chromosomal disorders are not distinct sexes. Klinefelter males are still males, despite an extra X chromosome. Nor are Jacobs syndrome, Turner syndrome, etc. If a layperson saw a Turner syndrome female lying on a slab in a morgue, they would have zero problem identifying the body as female. These disorders often impair gamete production, but they're still the same sex. Likewise menopause does not change someone's sex. "Gametic sex" is redundant: sex determines gametes produced. Going through menopause or dropping sperm counts is not changing one's sex. When biologists say that sex corresponds to gametes produced, it's implying that it also encompasses "has produced in the past". A woman going through menopause continues to be female.
A post-operative trans person will display different physiology from what their chromosomes indicate.
"Gametic sex" is only useful when discussing fertility, and is (mostly) a function of the other aspects of sex, but can change to neuter without altering the others (e.g. via vasectomy).
Chromosomal sex can't change. It's the fixed characteristic. For most people, the other aspects of sex, gender, and sexual attraction are determined by their chromosomes.
If one is making a distinction between these aspects, it's important to be clear about which parts can vary. A trans man is much less likely to be color blind than a cis man, for example, so if you're studying color vision you should ask whether the subject has a Y chromosome and not what their gender identity is. If you're selling clothing, you probably want to know the gender identity (for the style) and physiology (for the fit), but don't care about the chromosomes. You'll get bad data if you mix them up.
> A post-operative trans person will display different physiology from what their chromosomes indicate.
Correct: they display a physiology significantly different from what they would naturally produce without hormonal and surgical alteration. Gender is a social construct that is expressed, while sex is an inmate characteristic determined by chromosomes (though the vast majority of people express a gender corresponding to their sex).
Gametic sex is redundant with chromosomal sex. A person without a Y chromosome will never, ever produce sperm. A person with a Y chromosome will not ever produce eggs. Genuine intersex conditions are extremely rare (on the other of hundredths of a percent) and no one has ever produced both gametes.
Gender identity is so strongly correlated with sex that it's reasonable to use them interchangeably. When we say "women give birth", "girls start to menstruate at puberty" and "men experience colorblindness more often" good faith listeners understand the unstated implication that this extends to transgender men that retain functional uteruses and trans women.
It's an old word. It's been used both as a synonym for sex and as a different concept for most of its existence. Ideally we'd invent a new word to make the distinction easier.
I have never heard the term "gametic sex". How is it a useful distinction, when it normally changes throughout a person's life, unlike sex in any other interpretation of the word?
... indicates that the webmaster has never been to Germany etc. These are titles, not genders. In some countries the titles "Mrs.", "Doctor", "Professor" pile up into one combined title. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that drop-down list in much of Europe.
The tags "#titles #medical #academic" seem to indicate that this is well known by the web master.
I personally think it's silly to require someone to fill in the title in all use cases except for the title an education facility puts on one's fancy piece of paper. There's a certain vanity to it, like programmers who insist others call them "engineers".
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with that drop-down list in much of Europe.
And there is much wrong with it in other parts. It's two generations ago that the war against sexism put 'mrs' out of style over here, so it feels quite culturally insensitive in academic and therefore international environments to keep asking women if they are married or not.
But nowadays "Frau Doktor" usually refers to a woman who is a doctor, as "Doktor" has a male grammatical gender, so it's awkward to address a woman only as "Doktor X", even though that's technically acceptable. The grammatically female word "Doktorin" has not caught on, even though it's also correct.
There was no difference in German, it was "Herr Doktor" ("Mr Doctor") and you'd address his wife "Frau Doktor" ("Mrs Doctor"), so you couldn't tell who of them actually held the title (not sure what happened after divorce). Today, you need to get your own title, no more shared titles through marriage.
You can't fathom a situation where a German website would need or want to have a drop-down for English speakers in Germany? Because that's clearly where this came from.
Yes there is. Why would you possibly need to know this? You think it's more important to gather personal data just to do some email templating versus respecting the privacy of your users?
TBH I wished these sorts of dropdowns simply asked for pronouns and title for most sites. If I'm Dr. PuppyTailWags, he/him pronouns, that's all most companies need from me. I'm sure some exceptions exist: of course my doctor should know if I go by he/him but have a uterus, of course my dating profile should specify who I want to date. But say, my meal delivery service shouldn't care lol.
1) Because that's how people do it. Sometimes we all collectively settle on a standard that isn't the best, but that's just how it's done.
2) It allows for more easily expanding to multiple pronouns, e.g. "he/they" or "she/they", which indicate that the person is ok with "she/her/hers" or "they/them/theirs".
3) It makes it easier to state neopronouns (e.g. xe), by standardizing the form -- he/him/his is the same format as sie/hir/hirs or xe/xem/xems.
4) (My opinion) It feels more natural to say "he him" than just "he". "What are your pronouns?" "He." I dunno, it's a short enough utterance that it could be easily to mishear?
So you know how to refer to them to other people or in conversation. The order notes preference. So someone might use they/him, which means they prefer you use ‘they’ but if you use ‘him’ it’s okay.
It is redundant for the common pronouns. But once you step outside that space, people may need to see both. E.g., "they/them" is in the process of becoming established, so some will need the pair. And if somebody is using one of the neopronouns, most people are going to need to see both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopronoun
This redundancy is quite irritating to me. For most people, their pronoun is simply "he" or "she". Showing other parts of speech is only necessary for nonstandard pronounds.
Call me user, I'm going to use a fake name every time anyway. I couldn't be any less concerned with how I'm addressed by a machine as long as it isn't 'citizen', because I ain't picking up any cans.
The issue here is that your proposed approach is very English-focused. Not every language would allow for a straightforward "pronouns" selector that would result in a meaningful data point.
I'm confused why it matters how you're referred to in the third person. I'm not trying to be snarky: but you're not there if you're being talked about in the third person (like a police report or a newspaper article), and if you're there, they will use the English "you" which is gender neutral.
I'm confused that you're confused. You're never referred to in the third person, either when present or absent? Or if you are, do you not care at all what pronoun they use for you?
Correct, it's never come up in my life, although I've heard 'ma am' awkwardly on the phone once or twice. It's hardly worth losing sleep over much less adding pronouns to user profiles. It's better off optional for those who want the message to be seen that it's important to them.
I find this hard to believe assuming we're talking about English here. Yesterday in a meeting somebody referred to me with a pronoun while speaking to the group. And I'm confident that other people use pronouns about me pretty regularly, in that I do that frequently about them.
If you're saying you personally don't care what gender you get referred to as, that's your right. But for other people getting misgendered can be a significant problem. If you want to change that, it's not those people you need to get to change. It's the ones making such a big deal about other people's gender.
First of all the world of online is different than the real world, where there's no parentheses or tags floating next to you. Meaning new people you've just met in a meeting, say, have no idea what the pronouns are.
If they're out of the norm then it may make sense to mention it then, I don't think society is hostile to it. I believe it applies to less than one percent of the US population, so it seems excessive to establish a norm of behavior for all, since harmony seems achievable despite that.
For data collection purposes, a "sex" field is more informative than a "pronoun" field. That's not to say a "pronoun" field wouldn't be informative, only that pronouns supervene on sex except in outlier cases.
For what data collection purposes? You care more about whether I have a penis or vagina than whether I associate more with football and trucks or with dresses and makeup? If you want to know which ads to show me, the latter is going to be much more informative for you, even though gender is a weak signal for that. It's crazy to say that sex is more informative for all purposes. When I'm registering for some online service, why in the hell would you care whether I have a penis or a vagina?
I know that the differences between sexes is very relevant in a multitude of sciences. I'm not sure what gender identity is relevant to other than behavioral science and psychology, primarily applied to marketing. I would like to know more, though, so please share if you have any insight.
How much of that is because they forced it to be relevant? It's one of the few obvious ways to separate people into groups, so they did that for their studies. A popular categorization of humans before the mid 20th century was into three groups: "Caucasoid", "Mongoloid", and "Negroid". If that continued today, then there'd be tons of studies in the social sciences about how these three groups differ from one another, and it'd be therefore "very relevant" to a multitude of sciences. But we abandoned that false-trichotomy long enough ago that science does not miss it now that it's gone. It wasn't made relevant, so it's not.
Of course the arrangement of my internal organs is relevant to doctors and medical sciences. As is my blood type and my cholesterol level. That doesn't mean you should be asking for my blood type when I'm registering for an online service (unless, of course, that service involves blood donation or something). That's the whole point -- it's really, genuinely, just not relevant to the vast majority of cases where it's asked.
Oh, yeah, no disagreement with your assessment on whether or not a service should be asking in the first place. Just noting that biological sex is very relevant for something like disease susceptibility, along with a vast multitude of other things. It all comes down to those chromosomes.
Honestly, you could even skip pronouns. Just default to you & possibly they for third person references and write copy that avoids weird interactions of the word.
That's exactly right. Asking for pronouns only really makes sense in a single-language situation, but most of the world's population uses more than one language.
On the one hand, you can't reasonably force people to select either masculine or feminine, particularly in English. On the other hand, if someone has answered the gender question with "neither / other" or "unknown / I prefer not to say", how would you refer to them in French, say? Would you ask "êtes-vous heureux", or "êtes-vous heureuse"? Unfortunately many languages do not currently have an established or convenient way of referring to non-binary people. (Though perhaps it's true that "most" languages are like Finnish or Hungarian in that gender does not feature in the grammar at all. The Indo-European and Semitic languages with which English speakers are most familiar are somewhat exceptional in that respect.)
I was asked for race/gender/etc. on an award application one time. I declined to state because I didn't think that was relevant. Who wants to get an award based on demographics?
After I won, one of the organizers delicately asked me what my pronouns were so I would not be misgendered during the awards presentation. He said that he thought I was cisgender but needed to check because I declined to state.
I wonder what percent of people decline to state because they don't wish to share the info versus are not comfortable with the other options. I will continue to decline to state in almost all circumstances. Maybe companies will realize their data is garbage and stop asking.
What upsets me is that I was bullied my whole life for being gay and feminine. There were even a few times growing up where my teachers bullied me for not being "man" enough including PE teachers putting me in girls groups and teachers joking to the class that I don't need Maths because I'll probably be hairdresser anyway.
I'm not gay though. I'm just kinda weird, which I'm fine with even if others aren't. I think I'm just a guy who sometimes likes to wear a bit of makeup (think Fall Out Boy, not cross-dressing) and is straight, but also kinda asexual, I guess.
It's sad though because although I identify as a straight male and have spend my entire life being abused for my gender and sexuality, I now have the privilege(?) of being discriminated against in the workplace. Growing up my parents told me it was just school, but it's not, people just suck.
I learnt to handle the name calling though. Those who were badly bullied can probably relate, you have to grow a thick skin just to survive emotionally. But knowing employers might discriminate against you is different because you have no power.
On the 4473 form for background check in the US, the valid races are "White, African American, Asian, Hispanic". No other options, and no option to not specify. The fun part is, you can select ALL of them, not just one, and MANY people do just that.
This has always somewhat confused me, not out of obstinance, but because I dont fit neatly into any one box. Why the mix between between a color, continents/ancestor-origin, and a common language group. Those are 3 distinct types of things being lumped together while missing so many more options from those distinct things. I always mark all boxes on paper even when it's a select one bubble since I don't know which one I "belong" to. And how far back are we suppose to trace our human ancestry?
The legal recognition of different races has a strange and fascinating history. Pew Research has a lovely chart showing how the race options on the census have changed over the years.
Yup, but still it doesn't cover many millions of US citizens. e.g Sikh, Middle Eastern, African Africans etc (not that there can ever be a list that covers such a diverse country).
Right, but I assure you most of them do not consider themselves "white" by any stretch of the imagination. The term "white" has deviated so much from Caucasian/fair-skinned and became a mostly political term in the US that most Arabs specially 1st and 2nd generation would never identify with.
Not sure if my favorite is the FeMan versus Male Man, or the Canadian Applicant one. I was worried this would be a flame war topic with political raging, but this is just universally hilarious. Well done to the creator(s).
The funny thing is that I can sort of see how some of these end up happening.
Dr (male) and Dr (female) as separate titles makes sense for example, for i18n reasons, since some languages like Spanish will require the info - even a simple 'welcome!' would have to choose bienvenido/bienvenida depending on gender.
I like this site, shows how even 'simple' things can get complicated, in many cases you can see the logic that got them there.
The Canadian Decathlon one is here (go to the filter) - https://www.decathlon.ca/en/c/22252/sports - and you can see the train of thought that it makes sense to put a filter in as sportswear comes in male/female. Those filters probably make a bit more sense when filtering a specific category too but I can see how that would all get in without someone considering how absurd it'd look when filtering all products.
Kinda, but also no. It depends on a language. For example in Polish you'll say "has done" as "zrobił" (he), "zrobiła" (she), "zrobiło" (baby, or it). You don't get to play fancy with pronouns there, because the verb itself is modified. (Also to make things fun, objects are gendered too, so when speaking you need to know that the fridge is female and a table is male)
No becauase in some language the forms of words used to describe people vary depending on whether the person is male or female. It's not just a case of picking the right pronouns, it's the gender agreement of the other parts of speech too.
Do you have an example? Most languages I've seen that do this seem to be deriving gendered word variants from the pronoun, at least as far as I can tell with my very limited experience.
Spanish has a lot of word variants based on feminine/masculine/plural subjects, but it's not really based on gender (otherwise inanimate objects wouldn't have those variants); as far as I can tell with my limited Spanish experience they're based on word agreement in the sentence with the pronouns or at most with masculine/feminine presentation.
Is there ever a scenario where, "el gata" would be correct in Spanish? "Gato" agrees with the "el" pronoun; it's not based on the gender identity of the noun independently of the pronoun, is it? Are there other languages that work differently?
This also seems like a problem that doesn't really require knowledge of gender identity as much as "do you want us to use masculine/feminine variants of words when referring to you?" -- something that seems easy enough to guess based on the pronoun or (when loading up a language translation that needs more advanced logic) to just outright ask the user.
I kind of hate the software trend towards "we need to derive everything we're doing from first principles"; I feel like a lot of these problems could be solved by saying, "when we encounter an edge case we'll ask what to do, rather than doing data collection up-front that will be irrelevant for the majority of users."
> Do you have an example? Most languages I've seen that do this seem to be deriving gendered word variants from the pronoun, at least as far as I can tell with my very limited experience.
That's a weird way to put it. Words have grammatical gender, in some languages like Spanish there are articles like "el" or "la" that go with that, but in other languages like Russian there's no article.
For things in Spanish the grammatical gender is fixed. Eg, a window is always a feminine word. For cats it of course depends on the cat.
You're not matching the word to the article, but the other way around. "ventana" is a feminine word, so there's always a "la" before it.
> Is there ever a scenario where, "el gata" would be correct in Spanish?
Not in that specific case, but there are rare nouns where both are valid, eg "el mar" and "la mar", and sometimes with a subtly different meaning used for poetic effect.
So genuine question, because I am in the middle of building a dialog system that I'd like it to work with multiple languages -- it sounds like in the worst-case scenario we can encompass all of that behavior by just having a toggle in settings next to the pronouns for specifically those languages: "use masculine word variants / use feminine word variants".
If even that; if I know someone uses "el", then "el mar" isn't a problem, and I know to use masculine word variants in other locations. Is there any scenario where knowing that a user/player uses "el" to refer to themselves wouldn't allow you to derive what gender-variant of another word to use when referring to them?
I guess if someone is using completely agender pronouns (I don't know what that would be in Spanish) I'd need to ask about feminine/masculine word variants, but I'm still struggling to see why I need to know their actual gender.
Translation is actually a very tough problem, especially in games.
Take a sentence like "$PERSON picked up $ITEM".
Russian requires knowing the gender of $PERSON because the verb "to pick" is modified depending on the gender of the person. It also needs the accusative declension of the $ITEM. In Russian you don't just say "book" in every context possible like in English, the word "book" gets different endings depending on the context it's used. A bit like verbs vary in English: become, became.
You also need to be very careful with things like word play -- it just doesn't translate right. Eg, there's a point in Monkey Island where an actual monkey is used as a wrench, because "monkey wrench". That just doesn't translate, at all.
And culture. Eg, things like honorifics and the general way people talk may not necessarily translate. For instance apparently the famous Star Wars "Do not want" happened because in Mandarin shouting just "NO!" isn't a thing.
Point being, no, you can't translate simply and naively. Translating something like a game is a very serious job where you should actually talk to translators in advance if possible to figure out whether your wanted design is going to be a huge pain or not, and if something might not translate at all.
But this is exactly what I'm asking -- does it actually require knowing the gender of the person, or does it just need the pronoun to line up with other word variants? Because those are two different things. I keep asking this, and people keep on replying with language examples where knowing the pronoun would be completely sufficient to translate the sentence.
Does the Russian language allow you to mismatch pronouns and gendered variants of words with each other when referring to the same subject? Because if it doesn't, you don't need to know the gender, just the pronoun, and then you need to match the gendered variants of words to the pronoun.
What is an example of a sentence where if I knew someone's pronouns in a given language but not their explicit gender identity, I would not have enough information about them to be able to translate that sentence?
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> Point being, no you can't translate simply and naively.
This is also not what I'm asking. I'm not auto-translating games, I'm attempting to build systems where the options and information I'm collecting from players would allow a professional translator to translate that game.
I'm told up above that this requires not just knowing someone's pronouns but also their explicit gender identity. I can't find a language example where that's true.
> But this is what I'm asking -- does it actually require knowing the gender, or does it just need the pronoun to line up with the variant of the word?
That's one and the same the way I understand your question. Gender implies a specific pronoun. Though there can be exceptions, like where the "sea" in Spanish can be both a "he" or a "she", and which a famous poem uses to a hard to translate effect by alternating between both.
But, and I say this very seriously, translation is very lacking in things being "just" something. Eg, see this for a discussion of more issues:
> Does the Russian language allow you to mismatch pronouns and gendered variants of words with each other when referring to the same subject? Because if it doesn't, you don't need to know the gender, just the pronoun, and then you need to match the gendered variants of words to the pronoun.
Russian allows for sentences without any pronouns, or only neutral ones. Eg, the sentence "I forgot", in Russian has "I" as not indicating any gender, and it only being present in the ending of "forgot". You have to understand Russian grammar and cases to extract it from there. And yet "I know" is gender neutral. It's funny like that.
> This is also not what I'm asking. I'm not auto-translating games, I'm attempting to build systems where the options and information I'm collecting would allow a translator to translate that game.
I'm not talking about auto anything. I'm talking about that support for translation in a game is complex and requires serious planning. Any time you're composing a sentence from parts is likely a place where complexity will explode exponentially as you add support for more languages.
There's also all sorts of weird quirks to consider. Eg, if you have some sort of mystery, in Russian gender appears pretty much everywhere, so if your mystery murderer is one of the few women in the setting, then Russian makes it nigh impossible for anybody to refer to her, or for her to talk about herself, and not drastically reduce the list of suspects by instantly revealing it has to be a woman.
If you truly like to suffer, have a place where you form a string of the form of "$PERSON picked up $COUNT $ITEMS".
In some languages you need the gender of $PERSON, and it'll affect the verb. You'll need to know the right declension of each item that can be possibly picked up. Plurals of course need to be accounted for, and in Russian the forms of "file" for amounts of 1, 2 and 5 are different. So a little thing like that can balloon into pages worth of weird and complex code.
An additional fun quirk is polite language and honorifics. "Do you want some coffee?" can be said to anyone in English, has formal and informal forms in Russian and Spanish, and a whole bunch of possibilities in Japanese. If you happen to mention 5 different people in a Japanese sentence you'll likely make it clear who's your younger sister, who's a classmate, who's your superior, and who's the jerk you hate.
> Russian allows for sentences without any pronouns, or only neutral ones.
Right, but you're describing a situation where a specific singular sentence doesn't happen to have a gendered pronoun in it, you're not describing a sentence that requires knowing a person's gender. If you knew as a translator what pronouns a person commonly used, you'd still be able to translate the sentence "I forgot" in a grammatically correct way, right?
Unless Russia supports someone simultaneously using a masculine pronoun and a feminine variant of "forgot" when talking about them? But my understanding is that it doesn't.
We're not talking about a situation where we have no idea who the subject of that sentence is -- if you know what pronouns a person usually uses in Russian, it still seems like you could pretty easily translate that person saying "I forgot" -- because the important grammatical part of that is the consistency between the gendered variant of "forgot" and the gender variant of the pronouns that person usually uses.
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> If you truly like to suffer, have a place where you form a string of the form of "$PERSON picked up $COUNT $ITEMS".
So I have looked into this a bit as part of building dialog systems for my games, and yeah, it is super complicated. But while yes, it absolutely requires writing a ton of code and supporting a ton of variants and possibly even writing specific language-dependent code for certain translations, and while yes, it does require tracking object state to a much greater degree than you typically would for a purely English game, it still doesn't seem to change anything about what information I need to ask the player during their profile setup.
I'm still having trouble finding an example of where asking a player what their pronouns are isn't sufficient information from that player to do a translation.
Understand, I am not saying that translations would be easy, I am not saying that dynamically constructed sentences would be simple (they would not be simple). I am not saying that cultural translation and differing norms and references wouldn't be intensely difficult to deal with. But I can't find an example where I need to know the player's gender. I don't know of a language that gramatically distinguishes between pronouns and gender to a degree where knowing someone's pronouns wouldn't be sufficient to determine what gender-variant words to use to when referring to them.
I'm trying to imagine a scenario where someone says, "I use primarily he/him, but technically I'm actually agender", and I reply, "oh, good to know, we couldn't have done a translation with your character without also knowing about the agender part."
> I'm trying to imagine a scenario where someone says, "I use primarily he/him, but technically I'm actually agender", and I reply, "oh, good to know, we couldn't have done a translation with your character without also knowing about the agender part."
Ooh, so that's what you mean. In that case I'm quite sure it'd be extremely situation and culture specific, probably to the point of being impossible to accurately translate. Concepts like "agender" are deeply mired in local politics and characteristics of the specific language.
In English a game could treat somebody as "they" without much difficulty.
But in other languages, you quickly run into trouble. Eg, Spanish has seen some use of "@" as a stand in for indicating "either masculine or feminine", eg, "invitad@s" -- but that's rather quirky, goofy, literally unpronounceable and unfitting in any kind of serious context.
In anime there are characters whose gender is supposed to be unknown, like Nanachi (https://madeinabyss.fandom.com/wiki/Nanachi). This works in Japanese and English, but Spanish and Russian outright treat Nanachi as female, and just stick a "gender is supposed to be ambiguous" note somewhere in the corner and this particular bit about the character gets completely lost in the translation.
> This works in Japanese and English, but Spanish and Russian outright treat Nanachi as female, and just stick a "gender is supposed to be ambiguous" note somewhere in the corner
I don't mean to dismiss the concerns of nonbinary people who don't want to use any gendered variants of words to describe themselves, because 100% agreed, that's a real problem with translations to Russian, Spanish, German, etc... No dispute at all on that point.
But outside of that context, it sounds like Spanish and Russian do have a way of dealing with this situation? They use a default gender and add a note that it's meant to be a bit ambiguous. This is kind of what I'm getting at, it's not that Spanish/Russian languages have no way to talk about someone who's nonbinary, they just use a default gendered pronoun.
That is a real problem if you want zero gender at all, but most people aren't going to care -- for most people it would be fine to just ask their pronoun in that language, and at most follow up with "do you want feminine/masculine variants" if they provide an ambiguous answer.
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Coming back to this conversation a day later with a bit more thought, I really feel like we're talking past each other. My contention isn't that gendered languages provide an easy way to be completely genderless. I agree with you about pretty much all of the difficulties in translation you've talked about, and agree with you that nonbinary representation in those languages is difficult. I even agree with you that gendered verbs/nouns make writing ambiguous dialog much harder, absolutely hiding the gender of someone in a novel in Russian is going to be harder than it would be in English.
My contention isn't about any of that stuff at all, it's that the languages:
A) do still have mechanisms for ambiguous gender (ie, using default gendered pronouns) where defaulting to masculine case is probably fine for many contexts where you don't know who your user is or where you're referring to a generic non-specific user. It seems (at first glance at least) like that won't offend many people.
B) But more importantly to the starting point of the thread, making the determinations of which gendered nouns/verbs to use only really requires knowledge of the pronoun, not knowledge of the underlying actual gender identity that someone has.
In other words, if you know someone uses "el" in Spanish, it doesn't actually matter to the translation anymore whether they're nonbinary or not. Just from them telling you what pronoun they want to use, you know what gendered word variants to use when referring to them. My understanding is that Russian is the same; you don't need to know if someone is nonbinary, you need to know whether they want masculine or feminine word variants.
That being said, completely agreed that if you ask someone for a Spanish pronoun and they say "elle", that complicates things (although maybe that's a bad example since it seems like modern Spanish language in specific is now starting to some tools in that direction).
To address your central question, yes, knowing someone’s pronouns enough as long as the pronoun is a traditional one in the language. That is unless somebody wants to use a genderless neopronoun of some kind, in which case, good luck. But as long as people are happy to go with traditional male or female pronouns, the actual gender identity of the individual is a separate point.
You’re right in that knowing pronouns is sufficient to determine grammatical gender of words to be used with relation to a character in Russian. Combining a particular gender of pronoun with an unmatching form of verbs/nouns/etc is definitely not a part of the language, even outside some formal norms.
One possibly unobvious thing is, though - there are only three grammatical genders in Russian, so all words which do have gendered forms can have at max 3 of them (male/female/neuter). This means that if you do allow more than 3 kinds of pronouns, you’ll probably have to define the pronouns->grammatical gender mapping somehow. Well, I guess plural variant also counts, so maybe 4.
I think you're confused. In Spanish and other languages, both pronouns and other words depend on grammatical gender. Saying that you can “guess based on the pronoun” doesn't make sense, because the pronoun depends on gender too.
It's true that inanimate objects have kind of arbitrary genders, but for specific people, they're based on their actual gender.
But you can ask the pronoun. If you know the pronoun, you know what variants of words to use, don't you? You don't need to know if the person is transgender or what their gender identity is, if they use `el`, you use masculine word variants to refer to them.
I'm not sure what I'm missing here; the only reason why knowing the gender identity would matter is if gendered word variants are allowed to mismatch pronouns in the language.
And even in that case, does the specific gender identity matter, or do we really only need to know whether someone wants to use masculine/feminine word variants when referring to them?
My understanding is that it's reasonably common for a chunk of agender/nonbinary people to use traditional feminine/masculine pronouns.
It just seems a bit more direct to ask how people want to be referred to; I would compare it to how typically in web forms we ask people if they go by Mrs/Ms/Mr/Dr/etc directly, rather than asking them if they have a PHD and are married.
Especially if we're talking about gendered languages where there isn't strong support for nonbinary pronouns/variants. Someone telling us that they're agender/nonbinary doesn't actually help us much in that situation; we won't know from that information alone whether to use feminine or masculine variants.
The easy example in English(though obviously borrowed) is the difference between fiance and fiancée. Granted, this is a very domain-specific case, but points out that yes, gender can modify words in English other than pronouns and titles.
This is Personal Information and so the data processor must have a specific reason why they need it, and must take appropriate steps to secure it. They can't just capture it "In case we need it later" nor can they just store it haphazardly because it's not valuable to them, or refuse to update it because that's difficult.
I might be wrong but I don't think GDPR limits what information you can request, it's more about how the information is handled and the need for consent to collect it.
The implication of your reasoning means that pronouns shouldn't be used and in a lot of cases names shouldn't be used because there are other ways to address the user.
GDPR requires a purpose for processing. The majority of other requirements GDPR imposes attach to the purpose, rather than the processing activity.
GDPR gives a lot of leeway in determining a purpose. But if you don't have a purpose, then the processing is unlawful regardless of literally anything else you've done or not done. Not even with valid consent of the data subject (because, guess what, consent attaches to the purpose).
So if you say "we need this data for addressing communications to the data subject," that's a purpose. On the other hand, if sex gets stored in a DB column and never used, that's a violation.
Separately, GDPR has a Data Minimization requirement: you collect data for a purpose, could you achieve that purpose with less data? This one has some flex to it. If the answer is "we could but not as well," then the data has a purpose. Maybe not a great purpose, but it's something.
I agree. I recognize that gender & gender identity are important topics, and I don't mean to make jokes of it.... but these implementations are horrendously bad. Who builds an input form that says "Gender: Male, Female, or Hot Bread" and thinks "yep, this makes sense!"
Much like the others, this is most likely a ui reading the options from a dataset that was contaminated somehow. Combined with lack of maintainers actually using or testing the thing they maintain on a regular basis.
I very recently had a feature request that would have looked like the drop down in https://genders.wtf/gender/you-can-only-choose-one/ or worse. We shot that down, but I still struggle with the right way to handle this. Going only textbox seems more inclusive, but I think it's annoying for anyone who identifies as Male or Female to type it out rather than selecting (and you'll wind up with man/male/etc).
Depends on the reason you need to request gender, but for in-app pronoun purposes, I'd do:
[ ] male
[ ] female
[ ] non-binary
[text box for other]
And use "they" pronouns for the last two options.
(Ideally you'd allow the user to specify the pronouns themselves, but even among people who use non-conventional pronouns, getting them to correctly enter the subject/object/possessive cases of their choice is heavily hit or miss)
/shrug I like CSVs. Or, rather, TSVs. They're simple, structured and interoperable. It's the first format I reach for when building small pipelines.
The fault is not with the format, but with the developers that choose to use it after they've outgrown it. For anything more complex, choose SQLite. For everything else, choose Postgres. Use the right tool for the job.
There's likely much worse things happening in these cases than just broken CSV parsing. Since these issues got deployed to production, lack of testing, for one.
they're simple on the surface, until you get into the details of UTF BOMs cell escaping, handling jagged rows, and maybe a few other edges I'm failing to note right now
Kids as a third gender is actually an interesting case considering that in many European languages which have 3 linguistic genders the word for "child" is of neuter gender: "Kind" in German, "pais" in Ancient Greek, "dite" in Slavic etc.
This is a question that touches one of the cornerstones of the culture war, so you will hear radically different opinions from all sides of the discussion. I don't think we are at the point where we can just pick one way to ask for genders.
Even "male", "female", "other" is causing problems, as some people get offended for the "other" option (it should only be "male"/"female") and other people get offended for the "other" options (it should be "demiboy", "nonbinary", "catgender", etc.).
IMO the concept of gender is really not that useful anymore. We should only ask for sex, and if you don't need to know the sex you just don't ask.
In software it's useful in internationalization. In languages like Spanish or Russian you have to know the gender of the person or thing you're talking about.
This extends to non-living things, in many languages, you can't just do "$THING has been deleted". How you say "deleted" changes depending on the grammatical gender of the thing. "El objeto ha sido eliminado", "La entrada ha sido eliminada".
I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term (and different animals/objects have different defaults you're supposed to use, which you just kind of have to memorize).
For example, I was taught that if you're picking up a cat off the sidewalk, and you haven't checked its genitals, and you want to ask if it belongs to someone, you just use "gato", and it's understood that "gato" can mean both "explicitly male" and "I haven't taken the time to check." Similar deal for mixed groups containing people of multiple genders, I was taught if there's at least one man you use the male forms when referring to that group.
Admittedly I did have an American education, so it's very possible I was taught incorrectly. I don't put a lot of faith in my Spanish teachers. But it's not like gender ambiguity is a modern thing; scenarios where speakers don't yet know the sex/gender of the things they're referring to are a fairly common issue that will come up pretty often in any culture, regardless of what its gender norms are.
If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something, I assume you can tell that story to a friend in a way where your friend will understand you're not claiming that you were ever close enough to the fox to determine its sex. Again, I don't know, but I assume there are something like default gender-variants that Russian people use in that situation; I assume its possible to have that conversation in Russian.
> I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term
Yeah, but that doesn't work great in many contexts. If somebody already told you their name is "Maria" and you refer to them as a man, expect confusion or offense.
In Russian, people's gender applies to verbs and adjectives, so that works even less.
> If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something
Funnily enough, foxes are female by default in Russian, while rabbits default to male. If you're making a game, and foxes and rabbits are things you can run over, there are cases that will require you to have both a male and a female version of the conversation.
> If someone already told you their name is "Maria" and you refer to them as a name, expect confusion or offense.
Isn't that's true of every language, including English? Singular "they" has risen in popularity quite a bit in English, but there are still a ton of people who use "he" as a gender neutral term, and once someone tells them their name is Maria, they switch to "she". I'm not sure I see the difference.
If someone tells you their name is Maria or you learn someone's gender during a conversation, as the hearer you intuit that Maria is a common feminine name and starts using feminine pronouns; you stop saying "they told me their name was Maria" and start saying "she told me."
In English conversations with people who don't use singular "they" this is a pretty common experience I run into fairly often. If I'm telling a story about someone and I don't reveal I'm talking about a woman until part-way through the story, at that point the person I'm talking with will fluidly switch from "he" to "she" when referring to the subject.
> If you're making a game, and foxes and rabbits are things you can run over, there are cases that will require you to have both a male and a female version of the conversation.
I worry a little bit we're talking past each other, because I agree with all of this and I'm not sure I'm communicating well enough what my contention actually is. I would expect with any language with gendered verbs/nouns, you're going to need multiple versions of most text sections. But my point is that in situations where the sex/gender isn't known by both the reader and the speaker, there is a default version you can use, it's not untranslatable.
> In English conversations with people who don't use singular "they" this is a pretty common experience I run into fairly often. If I'm telling a story about someone and I don't reveal I'm talking about a woman until part-way through the story, at that point the person I'm talking with will fluidly switch from "he" to "she" when referring to the subject.
Doesn't work in many languages. You can't talk about somebody else or yourself in Russian in gender neutral terms for any length of time. Sentences like "I'm tired" and words like "friend" are gender specific. Gender neutrality like "they" isn't an option. Referring to somebody as a "he" then switching to "she" will be seen as confusing or insulting. So your plot twist is likely impossible to translate to Russian.
> But my point is that in situations where the sex/gender isn't known by both the reader and the speaker, there is a default version you can use, it's not untranslatable.
There are, but it typically doesn't work for people. Yeah, you can treat a rabbit as male by default, but that doesn't work in Russian for people. Eg, if you run over somebody, you can refer to them in neutral terms like "person", but that's going to get weird very fast. It's roughly like talking about running over a "creature" for an extended length of time -- people will quickly start wondering why you keep sticking to such a non-specific term.
> Sentences like "I'm tired" and words like "friend" are gender specific.
I know that; but there isn't a default gendered form to use when referring to people non-discriptly, like "he" is very often used for in English?
I just don't understand how that's possible; it's not a cultural difference -- there is no way that any population isn't going to run into situations where they're forced to refer to someone who's gender they don't know.
Not knowing the gender of a person you're talking about is an extremely common situation that would comes up all the time, regardless of a country's history or language. Is the sentence, "a cloaked figure approached me but was covered in so many layers of jackets and clothing that I could not tell if it had a penis" untranslatable in Russian?
A police report comes out and the police want to say, "someone robbed the convenience store and we're looking for any information we can find about the culprit." That's untranslatable in Russian? That's not a scenario that the language developed to accommodate? They can't default to masculine pronouns, they have no natural way to signal that they don't know if the criminal is male or female?
Even the car example -- it's extremely plausible if you witness a car accident involving a human being that you might not know whether the people involved are women or men. Are you telling me it's impossible to have a conversation about that without it getting "weird very fast?"
Gender reveals are not just plot twists in books, they happen in real life. There is no way that a culture wouldn't regularly encounter these scenarios; people have conversations about events that involve human agents where they don't know basic information about the humans involved all the time. It is just unfathomable to me that what you're saying about the Russian language is correct -- that you could witness an event happening from a distance where you couldn't identify the genders of the people involved, and the language just wouldn't have any way at all for you talk about it even by defaulting to masculine pronouns/variants; that the language was never at any point in history adapted for dealing with situations where you're talking about a person you saw who was wearing a mask.
Gender ambiguity is a scenario that Russians will encounter in real life and I guarantee have encountered in real life throughout Russia's history regardless of their cultural views or linguistic representations of gender. They probably have a way of talking about those situations, or at least understand that sometimes gender in a conversation is being inferred or substituted without factual knowledge of the actual person being talked about?
> Not knowing the gender of a person you're talking about is an extremely common situation that would comes up all the time, regardless of a country's history or language. Is the sentence, "a cloaked figure approached me but was covered in so many layers of jackets and clothing that I could not tell if it had a penis" untranslatable in Russian?
Sure, you can refer to them in explicitly vague terms, like "cloaked figure" or "person". You still use gendered language, only now it corresponds to that of the abstract noun you're using.
> Are you telling me it's impossible to have a conversation about that without it getting "weird very fast?"
Yeah, because there will be situations where you can't maintain ambiguity for long enough. Eg, take a sentence
like "I went around the corner and crashed into a stranger", "stranger" is already a gendered word (and the sentence also makes you disclose your own). Yeah, maybe you didn't see immediately who it was, but if you interact for any length of time, the cultural expectation is that you'll include it when retelling.
Eg, in real life you crash into somebody, get knocked down, they cuss you out, and you figure out that you crashed into a woman. When retelling though the normal way to explain it is to say "I went around the corner and crashed into a female stranger".
English allows for more ambiguity. You can say, set up a mystery encounter like: "We're meeting my room mate who works at NASA as an engineer, won a robotics competition and just recovered from an illness", and then boom! It's a woman. Can't do that in Russian. "room mate", "won", and "recovered" are all gendered, and you can hardly pretend you don't know who they are without looking insane or obviously hiding something.
You can of course technically do it -- "We're meeting a person who lives in my house", but it only works if you're implying you yourself haven't met them and know absolutely nothing about them, and it takes pretty darn special circumstances for it to make sense. If you know about their achievements because somebody told you, you'd know their gender and just use it from the start.
> Sure, you can refer to them in explicitly vague terms, like "cloaked figure" or "person". You still use gendered language, only now it corresponds to that of the abstract noun you're using. [...] "room mate", "won", and "recovered" are all gendered, and you can hardly pretend you don't know who they are without looking insane or obviously hiding something.
Right; while English has more ambiguous tools, even in English many speakers will think it's a bit weird to keep using "they" to refer to someone if you do know what their gender and pronouns are. (For many listeners at least), it wouldn't be natural-sounding dialog/conversation for me to describe my sister exclusively with the word "they".
I'm not saying that in casual conversation people would use ambiguous language -- but there are scenarios where you'll have conversations about something you saw where you don't at any point during that conversation have any knowledge of the genders involved, and of course the language has support for scenarios like that.
Agreed that English has more tools for explicit ambiguity; if you see a car fly off a bridge, you can say, "I hope they're OK." But even if you weren't using 'they', you could say "I hope he's OK" in that situation and the majority of people around you would understand that using the word 'he' wasn't a declaration that you knew who was in the car. The movement away from "he" as a default gender in English wasn't because without singular 'they' there was no support for situations where the gender was unknown, it was a movement away from the social/political/moral implications of default gender in society, and later became expanded into a way to explicitly accommodate nonbinary speakers and avoid misgendering.
I got curious about this and tried to look it up, and while the explanations were a bit limited, my takeaway is that it does seem like the Russian language works the same way? If a car flies off a bridge and you use masculine language to talk about the driver, and then later find out the driver was a woman, my understanding is that people probably aren't going to be offended about that or think that you've done something odd? At the point where you learned the driver was a woman you'd just quickly apologize and switch to feminine forms.
Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do?
Even in gendered language, you need to come up with some kind of "other" category, and you'll likely need to rewrite your sentences to make it work if you can make it work at all.
> Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do?
No clue. But at least you have the data to use whenever you figure out what to do with it, and I imagine somebody tackled that question already, since this is not something that showed up yesterday.
In some languages like English you can go with "they" or such, in others there aren't good options that would be widely recognized. But that's just how i18n goes. Languages don't neatly align with the desires of computer programmers.
I've discovered that for some people, they will feel ignored by not asking their gender identity, or at least their pronouns. Things feel more inclusive to them when they are able to register their identity, even if it's not used by anything in the app. A coworker put it this way: "We want to be celebrated, not ignored"
Can you steelman the idea that "many people obsessed with pronouns are narcissists" rather than just criticizing how others have discussed it? It may be more productive to try reframing the issue yourself.
"Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label — "sexist", for example — and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?
Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think."
Anyway - if you cannot steelman the "many people obsessed with pronouns are narcissists" phrase you are probably not the best person to ask other people to steelman anything.
Not if your definition of "to steelman" is to "make is sound not transphobic". I really don't consider something being "transphobic" having anything to do with whether it's true or not. I can imagine a statement that is both "transphobic" and factually correct.
It sounds like you really want to say, "people who care about pronouns[trans people] do so because they are narcissistic," but you really don't want to because you understand the implications of such a statement. Personally I think the idea is abhorrent, but correct me if I'm wrong about you.
You're the only one who's brought up trans people so far.
Apparently in your mind "obsessed with pronouns and wanting to be celebrated" automatically means trans people. You realize that other people use pronouns right? And you don't have to be trans to narcissistically obsess over them and insist on being celebrated.
I hope you're able to overcome your clear transphobia some day.
Please correct me. I cannot follow your line of reasoning on how addressing transphobia is transphobic. You realize the movement you're referring to is inherently connected to the trans community, right?
What I'm pointing out is that characterization is transphobic. Usually when people point out that a characterization is incorrect, they aren't accused of making that characterization themselves. Typically folks understand the difference and I expect you to as well.
You're the only one making a characterization involving trans people. Trans people use pronouns, so what? You're being transphobic because you're automatically associating trans people with the negative thing I said even though that association doesn't need to be made and you're the only one suggesting it.
This really isn't that hard. As I explained elsewhere, if you buy an iPhone that doesn't automatically make you an Apple fanboy. Likewise, if you're trans and you make it a point to use certain pronouns that doesn't make you a narcissist. I'm specifically calling out SOME people, not even trans people.
Some people absolutely do latch onto pronouns because it brings them attention. These are the people that want to be celebrated, because they're narcissists. I really can't make this any more clear that these are not just trans people. Do trans people tend to care more about pronouns? Sure. But that doesn't automatically mean they want to be celebrated for doing so.
What does transgender have to do with it? Are you implying that transgender people are obsessed with pronouns?
In my experience trans people just want to be called by their preferred pronouns. They’re not obsessed with it. Most don’t care about being “celebrated” they just don’t want to be excluded or harassed.
Maybe you can clarify. I said that the statement that "pronoun obsessed people are narcissistic" is not possible to justify without being transphobic. ie: it assumes transphobia. I'm not sure how that translates into me being transphobic, but I'm willing to listen.
Having preferred pronouns doesn’t automatically mean that person is obsessed with pronouns and wants to be celebrated.
If I buy an iPhone it doesn’t automatically mean I’m obsessed with Apple and want to feel special because I bought an Apple product. That’s an additional step.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
The claim that enjoying to be asked about pronouns is a narcissistic trait is unfalsifiable at worst and unable to be worked out through dialog at best. We could say something about it through surveys and descriptive statistics, but that wouldn't form the basis of a causal relationship.
Instead, rhetorically, it's much easier to ask if there simply isn't an interpretation which doesn't assume the worst in people. Doing so reveals more about the commenter than it does about the topic and kindly suggesting a positive or at least neutral interpretation builds bridges of meaning instead of assuming an argument.
This is a reasonable response, but good faith should go both ways.
Am I operating in good faith if I ask everyone if they are Sunni or Shia for some ulterior motive, assuming they are Muslim? What about astrological signs? I'd argue not, but a similar thing happens when pronoun-talk occurs.
Whether someone finds salience in pronouns' mapping to "gender identity"—insofar as the concept is coherent—is largely a matter of worldview. Many, if not most people, only care about sex. The imposition of worldview here is what motivates the narcissism charge. That and the fact that most TRAs are narcissists, but it could be unrelated.
"Ignored" is a feeling they have. Feeling ignored is unpleasant and can be hard, and deserves empathy. But feelings belong to the person having them.
You can choose to design your products to cater to feelings if you like. But that does not make it an ethical imperative to design your products so that no one feels a certain feeling.
Some fun info about gender and personal information I helped implement for our HR system:
* Gender options are configured by a per country basis. As in the system admin sets up the available options per country(As well as a few other personal info fields)
* Every country has different sets of personal info that can be asked, and that is required. (ie some counties required blood type)
* Most info can be configured to be hidden from managers and only visible to HR and the worker.
* Two personal info fields aren't ever visible to the worker themselves: date of death, and visual survey ethnicity. The latter is used for measuring diversity in countries that asking is illegal or frowned upon.
Interestingly, on the U.S. Form 1040 income tax return, when describing the relationship to you of your offspring that you are claiming as dependent(s), the only choices are "son" or "daughter".
Might you be using tax software that gives you choices? The 1040 has a free-text entry for this, and the instructions don't state that you must enter anything in particular.
The vast majority of U.S. personal income tax returns are prepared by software, even paper-filed returns.
As stated elsewhere, yes the instructions do specify the descriptors used for dependents. Interestingly, "grandchild" "stepchild", and "foster child" is allowed.
"A qualifying child is a child who is your...
Son, daughter, stepchild, foster child, brother, sister, stepbrother, stepsister, half-brother, half sister, or a descendant of any of them (for example, your grandchild,
niece, or nephew)"
That sentence is giving examples in general of who qualifies. It does not dictate how you fill out the field. The law just requires the child dependent to be related by blood or adoption.
But the instructions do list who is eligible to be claimed as a dependent, and son and daughter are the only listed options for your direct children. If you wanted to be pedantic and say that your child is not a son or daughter, then they would fall under "Any other person (other than your spouse) who lived with you all year as a member of your household if your relationship didn't violate local law" and you would only be able to claim the "Credit for other dependents", and not the "Child tax credit".
> (2) Relationship. --For purposes of paragraph (1)(A), an individual bears a relationship to the taxpayer described in this paragraph if such individual is--
> (A) a child of the taxpayer or a descendant of such a child,
> Neither the words ‘son’ nor ‘daughter’ appear in it at all.
No, what appears on the form is the column heading “Relation to you” with a free text field in that column for each line for a dependent claimed. But that is not the issue.
What appears on the instructions [0] determining when you can use the line (and what is therefore likely replicated in tooling which supports completing the form in line with the instructions) is this “A qualifying child is a child who is your… Son, daughter, stepchild, foster child, brother, sister, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, or a descendant of any of them (for example, your grandchild, niece, or nephew).” [1]
Which, read strictly, says that a first-generation biological descendant of yours must have binary gender (“son, daughter”), as must a biological- or step-sibling (“brother, sister, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister”), though binary gender is not important if they are your foster or adopted child (“stepchild, foster child”), nor is it important for a qualifying descendant child (but still required for the first ancestor through which their qualification is traced) of any of the others (“or a descendant of any of them”.)
I think it is pretty clear that the use of words specifying binary gender is overspecific drafting of either the instructions or the source legislation/regulation, not that there is really an intent to apply limitations by binary gender at select, but not all, levels of this qualification. But the limitation is there in the text.
That's a separate document, which is not IRS form 1040. The Form 1040 Instructions document is informative, not normative; you can compare for instance the qualifying child tests here: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p501#en_US_2022_publink1000... which as you see do not include gender. To be specific you may refer to 26 USC §152(2), which only specifies gender-specific terminology in (2)(b), where they mandate "brother, sister, stepbrother, or stepsister of the taxpayer". I'll be writing my representatives asking this language be changed to "sibling or stepsibling of the taxpayer."
In the meantime, Form 1040 itself does not and has never mandated a description of "son" or "daughter."
No, the instructions give a specific list of qualifying relations. They only give examples for the last one, which is a descendant of any of the earlier-listed ones. Except for that last one, “foster child” and “stepchild”, they all use gender paired terms (“brother, sister”, “half brother, half sister”, “son, daughter”, etc.)
> What if it’s asking about their sex rather than their gender identity?
Legal sex (which is really ascribed gender, and starts out as assigned gender at birth) has the exact same problem as gender identity here. As does assigned gender at birth itself (since there are people for whom that is neither male nor female as legally recorded.)
But given the mix of gendered and non-gendered terms in the instruction, its just a product of the fact that both law, and even more the bureaucratic processes and documents supporting its application, is very much not DRY, so “we recognize the existence of non-binary gender” isn’t a point change to the “gender” module of the legal system, rather it requires changes throughout a “code base” that is giant, and has no version control or test suite.
I suspect the problem is one of people mis-understanding the complex rules for claiming dependents. In decades past, the term "child" was actually allowed by tax software approved for IRS filing, but presumably too many people thought that meant any child they happened to have some financial relationship to, rather than the very specific relations required by tax law. By requiring more specific terms, it made it harder for people to mis-claim children as dependents.
It's not, as it refers to the two parts (female and male) of a binary reproductive system. There's no third type of gamete, and therefore no additional sex category that would make it non-binary.
First, why does the tax man need to know what genitalia your children have and are you comfortable with that? Second, what do you consider people with neither or both kinds? Subhumans ineligible to be dependents?
> Male/female is determined by chromosomes, either XX or XY.
This isn’t true legally (where “sex” is really an ascribed gender assigned at birth and possibly updated later for a variety of reasons) or medically (since an individual with a 46,XX karyotype can be male or female medically, as can an individual with a 46,XY karyotype.)
Ah. Totally relevant this piece of information when tax is concerned. /s
Seriously however, any link to where this is specified in the way you claim it to be? How does it see SRY gene disorders? If your child is a daughter to you but technically has XY, will the law mandate you to declare her as a son? etc.
do you guys think gender and sex will ever stop being treated as synonyms? I don't think it is possible for people to stop conflating the two concepts if they are synonymous.
I never thought casual homophobia, some of which I regrettably gleefully took part it in, would stop so quickly when I was a late-teen in 2000 - granted a lot of people did a lot of work to make it stop being acceptable and I'm sure for many it didn't feel 'quick' but as far as societal attitudes, at least in major cities, it seemed fast.
My favorite, albeit dumb, illustration of this is the remake of 21 jump street with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, they're mid-20s posing as high schoolers and to try to fit in, one calls the other gay, expecting to be an easy way to get in with the cool kids, but rather than join in the insulting, they congratulate the target of the slur for being true to themselves. You never would have seen that in a movie from ten years prior.
>> do you guys think gender and sex will ever stop being treated as synonyms? I don't think it is possible for people to stop conflating the two concepts if they are synonymous.
> I never thought casual homophobia, some of which I regrettably gleefully took part it in, would stop so quickly when I was a late-teen in 2000
On the other hand, asking people to reformulate their ideas about core concepts like gender and sex is a much bigger ask than to refrain from casual homophobia.
In many languages, there is no separate word for "gender" so for international companies I think this will take quite some time.
Even then, for the vast majority of the population, sex and gender match exactly. I don't think many programmers, designers, or managers actually care. They might after activist outcry, but since even the big and socially progressive companies haven't come up with a uniform solution that pleases everyone, I don't think it'll happen soon.
That is sadly not really the case. If you ask the majority of people the consensus is "male" and "female" are the only genders. If what you saying were the case we would not even get the "other" option, not to mention all the other neo-genders.
Counterpoint: plenty of software doesn't provide any third options, because representing the data a just a single bit is convenient and the idea that there possibly being more than two options never even crossed the developer's mind. When you do get more than two options it's because the developer heard that it might be a possibility and they wanted to account for it, even it's never used. I don't think you can gleam much information about the cultural context from what options are available in software forms.
> When you do get more than two options it's because the developer heard that it might be a possibility and they wanted to account for it, even it's never used. I don't think you can gleam much information about the cultural context from what options are available in software forms.
Not necessarily. There are programmer-ergonomics benefits to using a enums instead of booleans.
Personally, I'd never represent anything except a literal true/false value as a boolean. That has nothing to do with how I conceive of the possible values; it's mainly because I like to give things names that I can read.
Not at all - there's sufficient range in a 32 bit unsigned integer and any values used after the initial assigned values can have details in a lookup table modifiable as time passes.
In actual practice, the Australian Government found it sufficient to expand gender on passports from [M]ale [F]emale to simply include [O]ther (2011) [1].
I wasn't saying that these options don't exist. I was saying that not all dropdowns will include that information unless there is more consensus than there is currently.
I was surprised to find that an assertion I read on here some time back—that this sharp distinction is quite recent outside of a small slice of academia—was basically true, when I looked into it. When I was taught this in college in the mid '00s I assumed I'd just been ill-informed earlier and that those definitions went back decades, if not indefinitely, but in fact it had only just spread to the rest of the humanities, a few years before it was taught to me.
I do think it's turned out to be useful and think it'd be fine if that caught on, but do remain uncertain exactly how "mainstream" one may regard this usage—so, how useful it is for communicating with a general audience—especially internationally. Pretty much everyone on e.g. Twitter understands (if not accepts) the distinction, sure, but I hesitate to guess what a broader poll might reveal.
Eg, take the concept of grammatical gender. "Ventana" ("window" in Spanish) has a feminine grammatical gender in Spanish. I don't think it has ovaries, at least mine doesn't.
When a form asks for gender, it's typically concerned with the grammatical sort. It wants to know whether to welcome me with "Bienvenido" or "Bienvenida", not anything having to do with my biology.
If anything, the word "género" has historically only ever been used in the grammatical sense, while the word "sexo" applies to living things, including humans. I would be very surprised to find references to the "género" of a person in any sources before the 20th century. It's not even that the words were synonyms; earlier speakers would have thought of referring to the "género" of a person as redundant and indistinguishable from the "sexo".
In Spanish it's fine to say "Bienvenido" even to women. It's a generic greeting (used in the plural as well, as far as I know... unless you want to be fancy and say "Bienvenidas y bienvenidos", which is rather an idiotic trend).
> In Spanish it's fine to say "Bienvenido" even to women.
Not in singular as far as I know. Plurals traditionally prioritize men, so 20 women and 1 guy would be "ellos".
> It's a generic greeting (used in the plural as well, as far as I know... unless you want to be fancy and say "Bienvenidas y bienvenidos", which is rather an idiotic trend).
In plural, software could get away with defaulting to masculine.
But really that sort of thing only gets you so far. In Russian gender goes damn near everywhere, and trying to be gender neutral gets awkward very fast. For instance an instant messenger displaying the notification "Bob is online" needs to know Bob's gender to do it correctly in Russian.
One piece of software I've seen tried to get around it by transliterating the english word "online" in Russian letters. That's also rather awkward, and would be user unfriendly in many cases.
Probably not. Sex has a material basis, gender identity an ideological one. The former has much more staying power than the latter, which is likely to be seen as an unusual fad belief in the decades and centuries to come.
I think there are some concurrent realizations that will move it outside of purely ideological territory and be more impervious to being relegated as an unusual fad belief.
In the Americas and the Pacific islands, many cultures had non-binary gendering systems, and in the European colonization and cultural genocide this was one of many things that were erased as it was incompatible. So reconciliation and representation of indigenous cultures simply includes non-binary gendering, and it is not separable from this effort and direction.
This coincides with western non-binary recognition, the thing thats having a lot of resistance and lack of consensus.
I can see it being very likely that these efforts coincide and amplify the willingness to recognize a non-binary gendering system that is distinctive from sex, and not synonymous with sex.
In their historical usages, "gender" and "sex are synonyms. It shouldn't be surprising that past usage continues to the present, and it is not strictly incorrect to use language this way.
As for so-called conceptual "gender", most people these days probably mean the updated sense of "gender identity" which, insofar as the concept is coherent, appears to be fully pseudoscientific. The previous meaning of "gender identity" from the 90s (toddler's self-recognition of gender) has been eschewed completely in contemporary discourse.
There are probably ways to talk about gender coherently, in terms of expression, presentation, stereotypes, etc., but laymen have largely stripped "gender" of its coherence. I think the toothpaste is out of the tube on that one.
> "gender identity" which, insofar as the concept is coherent, appears to be fully pseudoscientific.
"gender identity" as used in psychology and sociology is a reflection of phenomena occurring in the real world. The existence of trans people and their reported experience is de-facto scientific evidence of gender identity as a concept. There are of course disagreements and mutually exclusive theories but we don't call physics psuedoscience because string theory and quantum theory are incompatible*, we just acknowledge that we don't have enough evidence to unify our understanding of the concept yet. All of this is of course made more complicated by culture as a moving target but the fundamental point stands.
> There are probably ways to talk about gender coherently, in terms of expression, presentation, stereotypes, etc.
people are out there doing it, they just use specific terms rather than general ones because our previous conception of "gender" is too broad to reflect our understanding as it has been updated by evidence.
The phenomenon regarding "gender identity" is real, but the underlying concept is incoherent, as I've said. This doesn't stop anyone from studying it, just in same way people study moral theories or theology.
what specifically is incoherent about it? I attempted to address that by noting that active areas of research will always have mutually incompatible theories that are incoherent when taken together, but perhaps I misunderstood what you meant.
You cannot "define what a woman is", but you can "identify as a woman" (what do you identify as?).
You cannot really say why being trans-gender is okay, but being "trans-abled" (so called amputee identity disorder) is not. Nor is being "trans-racial" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_transracialism_controv...). Even though we have long believed that race is more socially constructed than gender.
The whole concept of "gender studies" as it is now is one of the least scientifically sound academic fields (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair). The field is full of people openly questioning the very idea of trying to be an impartial researcher in search of "truth" and instead treat it as an activist project (https://hipatiapress.com/hpjournals/index.php/generos/articl... - an example of a paper that in plain text advocates for using male students of feminist studies as "viruses" spreading the good news).
Most of the theories are unfalsifiable anyway - and are no more scientific that angelology or hamartiology.
Plenty of people think things are coherent that, upon conceptual analysis, collide into a reductio ad absurdum around every corner. There are honestly so many problems with it, but let's go off the top of my head:
- Self-identity: There is nothing special about sex/gender as a property that distinguishes it as a special case for self-id from other empirical properties of human beings, such as height, eye color, or hair follicle shape. Barring special criteria, if we allow self-id for one property, we must allow it everywhere. Everything goes.
- If one truly believes that gender is distinct from sex, then what motivates one to "identify" as something else?
- Many if not most transgender individuals emulate the opposite sex and their associated gender stereotypes. Surgically-implanted breasts and facial hair are secondary sex characteristics—their presence has nothing to do with gender. How those characteristics are presented or hidden are gendered expressions, but not their mere presence.
- Epistemically, we only know what it is like to be the sex we are. We can attempt to understand "what it's like" to be the opposite sex, but we can never know. Therefore, one can "identify as" something else, but that something else is just a facsimile.
In a lot of places (at least in the US), "guys" is not a gendered expression. My wife will often say "do you guys want to meet at 9?" to a group of 100% women, and nobody even thinks about it being a reference to gender.
Very common in the Midwest. Now that I live far enough south, I've been working at converting myself from "you guys" to "y'all". It's been surprisingly difficult. :)
I don't often see people starting questions off with "do you guys" on Hacker News, but concidentally here it is on a gender-related post!
Whatever, I don't care - I can't get upset over someone saying 'hey guys' (though I try and avoid that myself), and I dislike making slackbot reply to that - just thought it was funny and possibly bait :)
Some of these are pretty funny, but is there really a "right" way to prompt someone for their gender? Maybe a selector for "male", "female", or "other" along with a textbox for clarification that is only available if you select "other"? Or maybe we should all start using the sliders from the Saints Row games.
TBH, the vast (VAST!) majority of services where I've filled out a form online don't actually need to know my gender for anything useful related to their service. I just assume every place that asks for it is selling the data someplace, or using it for their shitty recommendations engine.
About 99% of gender dropdowns are there for marketing purposes and serve no other purpose. If it's for medical purpose, then your gender doesn't even matter, as the doctor at most needs to know what sexy bits you were born with and if you take any medication.
Your doctor does need to know your gender as well as your sex, especially your GP. It's part of your behavior and mental health, which is also their remit.
A very very very extremely minor adjustment might be to rename "other" to "not listed".
The reasoning is that the word "other" can be alienating to some folks. The way we use the phrase "the other" to imply something foreign and untrustworthy in common language is a good example of why someone might not want to be called "other" in a form.
Now, this is a really minor thing, and won't impact 99.9+% of your users. But it could impact a few people! It's ultimately up to you whether you think it's clearer/more appropriate for your app to use "other", "not listed", or something else! My goal is not to be prescriptive, just to provide a little color and reasoning.
I worked for a while on a dating app (that was never released). It had over a dozen gender options and allowed selecting more than one gender. In the case of a dating app allowing multiple genders wasn't just about inclusivity, it was also practical - a non-binary person might want to also be classified as male or female for the purposes of a dating app, for example.
But in any case, it's the context that matters. Most of the time you don't need to know a person's gender so just don't ask. Many other times gender is just a proxy for something else, such as a person's title. It's better to just ask for their title than their gender.
Honestly, the correct answer is that in the vast majority of cases, there was no good reason to ask any gender question in the first place. People should think about /why/ they're asking this. Even in the rare cases where there's a perceived need, it's likely a more-specific and functional question would be better. Dating sites are probably the biggest exception where I can imagine there's a legitimate need for putting a lot of thought into true gender+preferences questions.
The only counterpoint that I can think of is that sex is public information.
If the form's request for sex is salient IRL, and the form-filer's sex will be apparent anyway, I don't think refusing or having an expectation of privacy about one's sex is reasonable.
This is not the case for most things, but I do think it goes beyond dating.
you're almost bang on here, but don't forget "prefer not to say"! Also you only need that text box if you actually GAF (which many do but half the time you'll throw it away), otherwise some poor data-cruncher is gong to be filtering out 100 "attack helicopters" and fifty misspellings of "womnan"
I remember reading an article about 10 years ago how do it right. I don't know if it is still up to date. But they suggested: Man, Woman, Other, "Do not want to specify".
There might be some exceptions, like an airline won't accept a non-binary gender because of safety (weight distribution estimation). For a dating site it might make sense to allow anything.
Some planes have weighing systems built into the landing gear but most passenger flights are WAY under max weight (Airbus can tell the pilots if the weight/balance once underway doesn't match what the computer was told).
This is the correct answer. There is no one answer that works for every use case. Asking this on a clothing website is much different than on a dating website which is much different than asking it at a doctors office.
I would only prompt someone for their gender when it's really necessary, and then use the reasoning for that necessity to form the prompt. For instance, how we ask someone to selecting a character trait in a video game should probably differ from how we ask them a similar question on a medical form. Gender can surprisingly tricky, and I don't believe there's a good "one size fits all" approach to this question.
I would associate N/A more with agender (someone who has no gender) more than someone who has a gender but it is not listed. For me, my gender is applicable, it's just not in that list.
"Not Listed" might be a better title for N/A?
Edit: Just saw your edit, makes more sense. Still feels a little on the edge for me, but we're all going to have different needs out of something like this.
The purpose of the standard is to give a numeric code which is language agnostic, for internationalization of forms and software.
Adding other genders isn't really applicable, since there's no common meaning or terminology across languages. M and F are universally recognized because they're grounded in reality: Every language in the world has a term for them.
I think a pretty tactful way to put it is "male | female | NULL", and I'm only half joking.
Many people prefer not to say for whatever reason, and people identifying as anything other than male or female aren't going to be a statistically significant minority for whatever data collection purpose you have.
Where are you from that your nation doesn't have some concept of gender (differing societal roles for, e.g., men and women)? I'm genuinely asking because I think it would be interesting to learn more about the language and culture.
I'm guessing the poster meant a culture that force separates humans into two subgroups instead of treating all as humans with a gender property that could be reconsidered.
I don't know even 5% of world's cultures but wherever people who dislike other people having self-determination bodily autonomy can get away with it I guess. Most of Russia certainly, Arab sphere, maybe parts of the US I heard is like that.
