desired attributes, why ask for gender

[Peter Watkins]

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.