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One way to address the issue with gendered grammar would be to ask the user to chose between which of ‘benvenuto’ and ‘benvenuta’ should be used when correspond

by Renaud 3y ago

One way to address the issue with gendered grammar would be to ask the user to chose between which of ‘benvenuto’ and ‘benvenuta’ should be used when corresponding with them. That way, you don’t strictly know their gender, you don’t have to ask for it, just what grammar construct they prefer you use.

jacquesm 3y ago
This is something that is easy to do in automation, but much harder to do in personal interaction unless you interact with people regularly. I've seen my name butchered in a hundred different ways and I've learned to simply not care but to respond to the message rather than the mode of address. And obviously I try to get it right whenever I address something. It's akin to the Robustness Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle .
pmontra 3y ago
That's another way to do it but I can see at least a couple of downsides: 1, the easy one: there might be more that one inflected form (gendered) in the UI and it could be tedious for the user to select all of them. Of course by choosing one we can automatically set the others. 2, the substantial one: strictly speaking the users don't tell us about their gender but there are strong hints about what they are, given the statistics of the general population and the name they gave us. I'm not sure how the Privacy Authority of a EU country would look at that but IANAL. Furthermore we're starting to make our app enter the rabbit hole of non binary gender identities and to handle that we would have spend more time and money for maybe no reason. I give an example that covers all those points: Of my current customers one is running a service for which they are mandated to collect personal data. They must know the official gender as in the official ID documents of the country. Anything more than that could be nice but it is not necessary and would be probably unexpected by users, maybe even looked at suspiciously. Another customer is running a B2B service. They need only a username and the company email of the users. If they want to welcome them with Benvenuto/a, Bienvenido/a, Bienvenu/ue they would have to ask for a bit of personal data that could put them needlessly into the scope of GDPR.

by Renaud 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

This is something that is easy to do in automation, but much harder to do in personal interaction unless you interact with people regularly. I've seen my name butchered in a hundred different ways and I've learned to simply not care but to respond to the message rather than the mode of address. And obviously I try to get it right whenever I address something. It's akin to the Robustness Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle .

pmontra 3y ago

That's another way to do it but I can see at least a couple of downsides: 1, the easy one: there might be more that one inflected form (gendered) in the UI and it could be tedious for the user to select all of them. Of course by choosing one we can automatically set the others. 2, the substantial one: strictly speaking the users don't tell us about their gender but there are strong hints about what they are, given the statistics of the general population and the name they gave us. I'm not sure how the Privacy Authority of a EU country would look at that but IANAL. Furthermore we're starting to make our app enter the rabbit hole of non binary gender identities and to handle that we would have spend more time and money for maybe no reason. I give an example that covers all those points: Of my current customers one is running a service for which they are mandated to collect personal data. They must know the official gender as in the official ID documents of the country. Anything more than that could be nice but it is not necessary and would be probably unexpected by users, maybe even looked at suspiciously. Another customer is running a B2B service. They need only a username and the company email of the users. If they want to welcome them with Benvenuto/a, Bienvenido/a, Bienvenu/ue they would have to ask for a bit of personal data that could put them needlessly into the scope of GDPR.