The Gender Question

Happy Pride everybody! Since it’s the month to highlight diversity and inclusion I wanted to talk about something that has been bugging me, especially as I fill out endless job applications.

It’s the gender question. Everywhere on the internet, you are asked for your gender. On signups for social media and websites, on e-commerce popups that aim to get the demographic for future marketing decisions, and on every single job application. In the US there are a series of questions required on every job application - gender, race, ethnicity, veteran status, and disability. I’m not going to go into the history of this and why these questions exist because that’s not the exact issue I want to bring up. I just want to focus on the gender question, as it relates to all of these things.

For 99% of the applications I have filled out, the options under gender are “Male”, “Female” and “Decline to identify”. My gender is not any of these things. I do not identify as “male” or “female” and I’m not specifically interested in declining the question, but that’s what I keep doing, as there are no other options. This doesn’t have to be the case, I know because of the 1% of applications I found where they added in “nonbinary” as an option. So it’s possible and within guidelines to add this option.

So why aren’t more companies doing it?

Especially since it’s pride month, I’ve seen a lot of companies changing their logo to rainbow and posting promises of acceptance and diversity within their ranks. And yet, an interested job seeker (me) finds an immediate derailment to those ideals when going to apply.

And it’s not just on applications, there are so many other places where users are asked for their gender. And plenty of social media sites have taken steps to increase the number of options, sometimes to the confusion or even hilarity of the groups they are trying to include.

So here are some thoughts from a nonbinary person about UX and gender:

If you don’t need to know, don’t ask. Honestly, the only person who needs to be concerned with what my gender is - is my doctor. Odds are most of the sites collecting that information aren’t doing anything with it. And targeted ads are so ridiculous that gender doesn’t actually end up helping the algorithms. So if you are building a user sign-up, maybe just skip the question altogether.

Keep it simple. And I don’t mean just having “Man, Woman, Other” as the only three options. Don’t other an entire portion of your userbase by signifying a group of diverse people as “Everybody else”.

Know what information you are really asking for. Do you want to know the gender identity of the user? Or their biological sex? Or just what pronouns to use for them? Be specific in what you’re asking for, and have your response options reflect that. If you ask for “gender” most people assume you mean gender identity, and if you ask for sex people will wonder why you are so interested in what their biological makeup is.

Ask for input, especially from non-cis people. If your options are “Man, Woman, Transgender” you are asking every binary-identifying trans person to decide if they identify primarily as trans or as a man or woman. Many trans women and trans men would prefer to just answer “man” or “woman” so if you think you’re collecting data on non-cisgender users - you’re not. Before you launch your form, get somebody to look at it. Explain to them the info you want to collect and why, and let them tell you how they would interpret the question and what information they would give.

Just make it a text input. There are more examples of what not to do than I could ever put in one blog. And there are a lot of different gender identities out there, and if you try to add them all to one dropdown it starts to look ridiculous. So, whenever possible, allow for direct user input, so a person can be as specific as they want.

But the biggest thing I want to come back to is that you probably don’t need to know the gender, so why are you even asking?

And if it’s a mandated question, please please just give more options than “man” and “woman”, especially if you are claiming to be supportive of LGBTQ employees and job seekers.