desired attributes, why ask for gender

Chris Messina chris.messina at gmail.com
Tue Dec 15 22:06:02 UTC 2009


Gender is also useful in generating things like activities and actions in a
social context.

It can be very awkward — in English at least — when you need to resort to
using full pronouns, or "its".

In some cultures, gender isn't represented, or represented consistently in
language; still, from a UI perspective, I think it can make for much more
friendly interfaces:

"Pat tagged you in this photo. Look at the rest of her photos."

Etc.

Chris

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Paul Madsen <paulmadsen at rogers.com> wrote:

> thanks Peter, I misinterpreted your earlier msg, in which it appeared you
> were asking for gender not because you needed to, but because you could (ie.
> it was in the schema and Yahoo would supply it)
>
> When you dont have a gender, presumably you fall back on 'Dear Pat Smith'
> in your salutations .....
>
> paul
>
>
>
> On 12/15/2009 3:06 PM, Peter Watkins wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 02:27:35PM -0500, Paul Madsen wrote:
>>
>>
>>> If you dont have a pressing need for the user's gender, why ask for it?
>>>
>>>
>> Customer service -- it's nice knowing whether to address the individual as
>> Mr. or Ms. before picking up the phone or drafting a written note.
>>
>> Our UI model is to always show individuals what data the OP sent, and
>> always
>> give each individual the choice of deleting/unsetting the information, so
>> anyone can choose to have an un-gendered profile.
>>
>> Socially I expect there's a risk here of upsetting individuals who do not
>> identify with either gender, but I would hope that such individuals would
>> use OPs that, like us, allow them not to declare a gender. It's a good
>> point, though. We haven't gone through UAT yet, but I should probably
>> change
>> the unset gender label from "Please select" to "Unspecified" to more
>> clearly
>> indicate that we don't need the info.
>>
>> -Peter
>>
>>
>>
>>> On 12/15/2009 12:12 PM, Peter Watkins wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>> Gender wouldn't normally be on my list, but since it's in AX Schema and
>>>> available from one of our two featured directed identity OPs (Yahoo), we
>>>> will be adding that to our user profile model and requesting it from OPs
>>>> when our users indicate that we may ask OPs for contact info.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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Chris Messina
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