3 ms·
Frankly, it is none of your business what the sex or gender of a user is. I understand that sometimes there is money to be made by collecting this information
by regis 13y ago
Frankly, it is none of your business what the sex or gender of a user is. I understand that sometimes there is money to be made by collecting this information but it is also alienating and just plain irrelevant (and I think there is also money to be made in recognizing that people can be fluid.)
You can give your users an option to provide you with these details but guessing/requiring is not a good practice.
On a side note, it's interesting that the most common gender neutral title is Dr.
- icambron 13y agoI think you're looking at this through too narrow a use case. I agree you shouldn't be taking individual people and guessing what their genders are. And you should minimize the instances where gender is even relevant in your application. But what if you have a whole bunch of data and want to do some aggregate statistics? "Do women use our product?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask yourself. You don't need it to be exact, and it's certainly not reasonable to ask every user. So you use some heuristics and you get some useful data.
- regis 13y agoI agree I'm mainly concerned about cases where gender follows you around a website when you're logged in. "Good Morning Mr. _" and stuff like that should be avoided unless supplied by the user. For your own stats using this library is probably better than asking users for that information.
- tttp 13y agoIn quite a few languages, you need to know the gender to write personalised emails, eg. Cher Joe vs. Chère Jane.
- ldh 13y agoThat's a pretty poor definition of "personalised". When people get canned emails which guess their gender incorrectly it just seems a bit sleazy. "Hi, you don't know me but I want your money."