There's been a bit of a discussion over the past few days about Diaspora, this attempted open source version of Facebook, and their decision to get users to write their gender into a text field rather than select it from a drop down menu.
The person who proposed this is looking at this from a really theoretical point of view; it's good because for a lot of people gender is not a binary thing. Allowing people to write it in will allow for a level of customisation that will be good for transgendered people, those who may not want to tell other people their gender, etc.
The main argument against is practical. It will make it harder to collate the information onto a database and this will make it harder to do some things. It is therefore bad for usability. They'd prefer a drop down menu with two options.
Thing is, I think the drop down menu people are just as clouded by their opinion of transgendered people as they claim the designers are. Having gender in a text box makes some people's lives easier, therefore it is in some way good for usability. There is absolutely no space in this for a discussion on whether gender is binary or not. If some users think it isn't, then we have to meet their needs.
The question we should ask is; do the benefits that a text field will grant to transgendered people, those concerned with anonymity, those setting up accounts for non-gendered objects, etc. outweigh the benefits of having easilly collated data?
Why would a user need to know another user's gender? Possibly to send a gender specific message, but this is rare. Generally gender specific groups are better off setting up a group for themselves. Possibly for marketing, but Diaspora is trying to move away from collecting data on us without our permission. The big practical use is for those who use the site as a dating tool. But surely they'd be best served by an app that asks specific questions and puts them in touch with other people using the system in the same way.
The biggest reason gender should be included in a site like this is that humans like to know who they are talking to. But a text box does this fine. Facebook uses text boxes to describe religion and politics, and while it is useless as a database tool people make sense of it easilly enough.
If we want to organise our databases in such a way as to allow people to enter their own information, then computers need to work out how to think like we do. They need to make sense of the data we give them by relating it to other terms and looking at the context.
For this to work, we need at least an extensive thesaurus which ignores capital letters and punctuation, and yet can distinguish between words which contain other words, like 'woman' and 'man'. We can then cluster like terms together: so for instance womyn, girl, grrl, female, etc. would all be in one cluster. But it would be possible to "zoom in" on specific areas of womanhood: for instance: butch-dyke, tom boy, butch, etc would be a cluster within the larger one.
The best thing about this is that it's not hierarchical: Womyn, dyke, girly girl or whatever or not all subsets of female. They are autonomous terms that are related to each other. Each term may relate to female but it could also equally relate to other terms which are not related to female.
For extra validation, we could expand the system by including links to other fields. So, for instance; someone may write in that they are a member of the Conservative Party but also say elsewhere on their profile that they are vegan, interested in animal rights, the environment, and such. So their profile could end up getting clustered with people who they could never be linked to through a simple answer in a database field.
There are problems here; all these terms will require a lot of cataloguing. Some of this will eventually be done by computers which can establish links between terms: for instance a system may not know that "vegan" and "animal rights activist" should be clustered together. But it can note a connection if users using these terms frequently support the same causes or attend the same political events. This may be some way off yet, but long term it seems like the best solution for social networking databases.
