Today I ran into a post by a developer working on software for Diaspora, yet another social media aggregator, which famously opened up to private alpha testing last week. A friend of mine managed to get on it, I haven't been as lucky. This developer was announcing that he was stopping development for his Diaspora app. The last straw?
Well, for the Diaspora profile, gender is a free-text field not a pick-list. In his own words. He's getting some flak for this position, so it's possible that link won't always work. I saved a copy of the page for posterity if it comes to it.
His main argument against a free-text gender field boils down to two main points:
As for gender being a linguistic construct, yes it is. However, that's but a subset of the overall concept of gender. On a social media site the Gender field on a profile is less about whether that person is a him or her and more about how they identify themselves. For 80-90% of social media users the idea that they could be something other than male/female has never crossed their minds, but then there are those edge cases.
The link Avery had in his post, which is where he learned about the free-text gender thing, goes into some of the edge cases.
As much as not being able to programatically determine which pronoun set to use annoys developers, having a text field for gender is a nice user-factors feature. If they really wanted to be dev-friendly, a second field for pronoun preference could be presented during the initial profile build:
The whole user-factors vs. automation fight has been going on as long as there has been paperwork with check-boxes. But still, this is one thing we can definitely improve on as an industry.
Well, for the Diaspora profile, gender is a free-text field not a pick-list. In his own words. He's getting some flak for this position, so it's possible that link won't always work. I saved a copy of the page for posterity if it comes to it.
His main argument against a free-text gender field boils down to two main points:
- Gender is a linguistic construct.
- If you're writing something that will present the user with pronouns (he/she) a free-text field is useless.
As for gender being a linguistic construct, yes it is. However, that's but a subset of the overall concept of gender. On a social media site the Gender field on a profile is less about whether that person is a him or her and more about how they identify themselves. For 80-90% of social media users the idea that they could be something other than male/female has never crossed their minds, but then there are those edge cases.
The link Avery had in his post, which is where he learned about the free-text gender thing, goes into some of the edge cases.
As much as not being able to programatically determine which pronoun set to use annoys developers, having a text field for gender is a nice user-factors feature. If they really wanted to be dev-friendly, a second field for pronoun preference could be presented during the initial profile build:
Preferred Pronoun (for applications, will not show on profile):For languages that aren't English that may have multiple pronoun markers, this is also useful (maybe there are different pronouns for different age clades, or caste, or whatnot. Not a linguist, it shows). For English it allows someone to state their gender as 'Yes' and pick the neuter option, while allowing someone else to put 'Lady Gaga' as their gender and get presented with masculine pronouns in linked apps. This works better by FAR if it is guaranteed to not be displayed on the profile itself. This is not a new concept.
The whole user-factors vs. automation fight has been going on as long as there has been paperwork with check-boxes. But still, this is one thing we can definitely improve on as an industry.