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Asking About Gender

@askingaboutgender / askingaboutgender.tumblr.com

Examples of good UX practices for collecting and displaying information about gender. Please submit your own examples and feel free to ask questions

Hello new readers! I don’t update this a lot but I will try to in the future.

This is my favourite gender form. Spaces for male and female, as well as a free text box to write in. The ? icon when hovered over will tell you why and how gender and DOB will be used

Caveats: The label for the text field is “other” which is pretty bad, also male/female would probably be better off as “boy/girl” for this example (”man/woman” for adults.)

Me at Scotland JS last year talking about asking for gender, and when you shouldn’t

The top photo is from http://www.ruby-survey.com/. You have to select one but at least non-binary is an option.

The second is from Young Rewired State. While the field is mandatory, it is a free text field so you can enter whatever you choose.

Google+ have just changed the gender field into a free text field. It will be interesting to see how many people use it.

The pronoun field isn't very good though; 'Other' here actually means 'Their/there' but it's not very obvious.

OK Cupid have started to offer greater gender and sexuality options to some users (via Pink News http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2014/11/16/okcupid-begins-rolling-out-new-sexuality-and-gender-options/)

Good

  • Allowing multiple options
  • Laying out all the available options openly

Bad

  • As a dating site, having trans woman/man as an option can cause issues. Trans people who select a trans option could be subject to chasers and other forms of abuse. Trans people who select Woman or Man leave themselves open to abuse or violence when a potential partner finds out about their trans status
  • The gender list is quite short and users can't add their own genders to the list

As web developers, we collect a lot of information about users and it's important that we do this in an inclusive and sensitive manner. This post aims to explain what we mean by gender variance, specific issues gender variant people face and how we can design services to help them.

Disclaimer: This post is by me for my employer's blog

On Tuesday 21st October, a group of us from the Nonbinary Gender Inclusion Project met Ben Jordan (Senior policy executive) and Andrew Hargreaves (Director of Marketing Communications) from UCAS. W...

UCAS (the group that handles university applications in the UK) is looking at changing the way they ask about gender to make it clearer and to help transgender and non-binary people

Introductions

Asking about gender is a harder question that a lot of people realise, and it can be difficult to know what is useful. This blog will have examples of good practices for collecting gender information.