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Obligatory shoutout to the podcast “If books could kill”.
I’ve never actually bothered to find out what that book was actually trying to claim, so I had a bit of a lol at the description of that episode:
In 1992 a yoga instructor with a distance-learning PhD had the courage to ask: “Are women not getting help around the house because they’re using the wrong modal verb?”
And I, as a front end developer, have to put all of those on this drop down list.
What about a free text field or just don’t ask people about their gender?
Sometimes you have to ask for it. E.g. I work in the life insurance business and we need to know the gender for policy calculation.
Ok, but isn’t that just to make vague generalizations about someone based on their gender?
That is the whole insurance business. It is nothing but a bet if you look at it by a single policy. E.g. your insurance bets you’ll probably die at 70, so when you hit 71 you paid more than you get when you die. Your insurance wins. But when you die at 55 you “win” the bet. But because there isn’t just one but thousands of policies those bets aren’t bets anymore, they’re nothing but statistics. And one part is keeping track and calculating how old people born in year xy, in country … with the gender zxy are going to be.
They need to know if you’re more likely to skijump into volcano or die from pregnancy to maximize profita
Wouldn’t birth sex be more useful in that context than gender?
Nope. I don’t know exactly why but it seems that e.g. a trans man is more likely to die in a stupid accident like driving a motorcycle without a helmet at 200km/h and vice versa. It isn’t much of a medicine aspect and more of a lifestyle one.
Oh ok. Yeah, that makes sense.
Gender
⚫ Female
⚫ Male
🔘 Gliese 436 bBut on a more serious note, if you actually need to know the user’s gender, a perfectly good set of options could be eg.
- female
- male
- other
- would rather not say