Male to Order

This may be the reason the question is asked in the first place.

The first thing is to ask if this absolutely necessary within your system? If you don't need to ask for a gender then don't. Kylos Do you mean biological sex by birth, biological sex by correction or psychological sex? AndrewMartin "Psychological sex" doesn't exist. Sex is always biological, determined by what you were born as and whether you have a Y chromosome or not.

Everything else goes under the gender umbrella. Pyritie there are at several misconceptions in your statement. Pease take it to biology. You are mixing genital configuration phenotype with the genes behind them genotype in a discussion that is about gender. In broad XXI century. It's not that hard to imagine cases where gender is needed.

Patriarchy - Wikipedia

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey comes to mind. As does anyone who wishes to advertise to you. Outside of medicine there is still the fitness industry. I think this answer would be better if it didn't basically deprecate the user for maybe having a reason to need to know.

Dmitry Grigoryev 2, 7 Finally an answer to the question. This kinda seems the best way to do it. I know some other answer advice to use the length of the words but i actually think a user understands easier the alphabetic order. However, most native English people would state this as "male or female" - it's just a consequence of how the phrase sounds linguistically.

I probably wouldn't make a formal complaint about it either, but I would find it mildly distracting. From a user experience point of view, why stray from convention? If I'm hired for user design, it's not my place to assert my personal ethics on either my client or the users. If they traditionally are trained by a commonly asked question to look for the "male" option first, it is my job to work with their expectations and not against them. I certainly don't want to exploit my work to make a political statement and distract them from continuing the survey or I've failed in my job.

Rowan M 2 3. If I wanted to make a point about social equality, then I might favor the "progressive" act of placing female first. But if my goal is actual a simple user experience, then commonplace tradition is likely to be the easier experience. I had not considered the form of the question in my answer, but you're absolutely right. Whether you adhere to convention or not, you have to at least be consistent within the scope of your form.

Are you serious about male being the norm? Verena, it's most common in my experience. It's also so trivial that I doubt either order is going to significantly disrupt the user, but it's uncommon enough that it would stand out if I saw female appear first. I'm born and raised in USA. Not only does the guidance suggest people rethink the binary options, but also: They provide a checklist, indicating that among other things researchers need to: There are 5 ways to organise things. Location Alphabetical Time Category Hierarchy or Magnitude Since none of the others could apply with acceptable logic, the only sensible answer is alphabetical and you would of course introduce the options in the same order: Are you female or male?

Female Male However, that answers the question only as asked, without getting into a debate about the sensitivity of the question's wording. Yes No We want to make sure the following questions are relevant. Please select an option below that describes you best Female Male Prefer not to answer.

But at least its far less intrusive and personal for a sensitive few, and honorific-translation errors are more likely to give rise to comedy than tragedy. But why would you even need a title unless perhaps it's earned, like 'Dr. Alphabetical order will become non-alphabetical after localization. Even if you disagree and say that it has become ok in English, or that salutations like "Dear Joe Smith" do not sound "wrong" nowadays, that does not mean the same rules can be applied to other languages. Mapper Mar 29 '17 at 6: Diversity surveys I have filled in for my employer always include such an alternative, whether it's for gender, sexual orientation, disability status, or otherwise.

Randall Munroe from the xkcd blog has a different approach: Do you have a Y chromosome? Ooker 5 But it is still ambiguous in certain cases en. Sure, but that doesn't apply in all cases. Also, if you just assume having a Y means they are "male", then all kinds of identity verifications might fail if you put in "male" in the backend and they are transgender and have all their other profiles set to "female". Better just ask what their gender is This approach specifically worked there because it was looking for a genetic basis for colorblindness.

In everyday cases, this is a potentially offensive way to ask: This suggestion is unconventional, complicated, and, outside a few specific medical contexts, unlikely to be the most relevant formulation of the question. While at first glance it appears to be a reductionist approach, it fails to recognize that biology is complicated.

What's more, it is about as insensitive to concerns of transgender people as the North Caroline state legislature. This is almost never the right answer unless you're specifically investigating a biological phenomenon, as Munroe was. That's rarely the case for most internet forms. To that, I'd suggest being more specific about what exactly you're going to use this information for: Facebook does this really well if you're logged in and choose a custom gender they do a binary choice for new users though: It leaves the decision and usage to the end user, instead of saying "what's your gender" and making a decision based on our own lifestyle.

In theory, the pronoun approach might be problematic under localization e. Mike 2, 6 It's not that limiting it to 2 genders is offensive to some, it's that it's incorrect. It's like having a 'What is your race: White or Black' field. JonW Incorrect according to whom?

Mail Order Brides - How Can We Help You?

Google has the definition of gender as: Mar 28 '17 at It's incorrect because it isn't accurate for the people using the system. It doesn't matter what Google says is the definition, or what a dictionary says, or anything other than the User. We are UX practitioners, we need to ensure our solutions are fit for use by those users. Limiting it to just Male and Female does not. JonW You could at least provide a single example Perhaps you have elsewhere; if so I missed it.

If you are thinking of transgenders, that just means that gender identity is not considered; the information collected would be different than that, but not incorrect. For chimeric individuals, there is often a dominant DNA set. The "androgen insensitivity" mentioned elsewhere does not seem to make 2 genders incorrect either. I can think of some ways that someone might need to answer "both", but that is so extremely rare that the form is likely to have worse problems elsewhere first ex: In short, if the question is good for Here's a paragraph that sums up everything and the best approach according to the article: Joao Carvalho 1, 1 5 By that standard the question "Are you a student?

Article's author seems to be trying to please everyone, but didn't mention any attempts to actually ask the people he's surveying. To answer the direct question, I prefer "male" before "female" as a user. Efficiency is not sacrificed for either user case. DepressedDaniel 1 1.

DmitryGrigoryev So you make the script respond to! This will make the testers happy, and possibly even power users. Testers tend to hate randomness, cause it makes it a lot harder to do their job and test everything. If you can induce one outcome or the other at will, though, that problem is mostly solved.. You can displease all the people all the time. Thing is, no matter when you "implement the randomness", it needs to be tested. And you don't want the developer doing all the testing. Blind spots, tunnel vision, and confirmation bias are real issues. So it falls to the testers, and the problem returns.

Aside from that, you have the problem of deciding which order the static content should take. And now we've come full circle. Also, what if someone gets insulted for not being listed first from the bottom or at the center?

Accessibility links

Your post is rather contentious, but apart from that randomizing the order is probably the worst thing you can do. If for whatever reason someone needs to fill in the form a second time for example because posting it failed having a different order from last time without a clear reason, adds a cognitive load.

It makes it more likely that the user accidentally gives the wrong answer because, for example, they assume the default option is always the same and skip over the question. Worst thing for bots and inattentive users, yes.. But my point is that is frees you from being accused of lack of political correctness - and if you follow any arbitrary order you're still leaving room for that. You know, there's a war on common sense going on right now. Edited to make that clear.

Typically, this can be as simple as "Other" or "Prefer not to say". Mayo 5, 5 24 Far better to not ask, unless you absolutely CAN'T avoid it. Not so sure I understand why you need other if it's for medical reasons. If this question is for medical reasons then knowing if a person has a uterus or a prostate may very well be required information, and other is not an acceptable response.

I would suggest that the default choice should be "Unspecified", listed last. An advantage of the term "Unspecified" is that it will by definition be correct until one of the other selections is specified, and implies nothing about why it was chosen.

All-male White House health bill photo sparks anger

I like this, but "Other" and "Prefer not to say" are two very different meanings. The first covers e. It might be worth including both. But if I was nonbinary, and my only reasonably accurate option was "Prefer not to say," I think I would be a bit annoyed. One other option is to mark this as an optional question. This would address the use case of asking the question but also would address the scenario where the user does not have to answer the question if he doesn't want to.

If you are asking a variety of similar questions, eg: What is your gender identity? What is your birth gender? What is your sexual preference? For what gender identity are you most often buying our product? What gender do you feel our product is the best match for? Consult your legal team before completing the design phase of this work. Male lion alliances are extremely successful in preventing solitary males from invading their pride. Small coalitions are often composed of unrelated individuals while large coalitions are largely composed of related individuals. Therefore, in lions, researchers propose that cooperation between non-relatives is hypothesized has evolved in cases where there is little variance in mating opportunities among coalition members, and males share equally in mating opportunities.

Smaller groups are composed largely of unrelated individuals which eliminates the possibility of kin selection. Without cooperation, males would not be able to defend their pride. Mutualism appears to be the driving force in the formation of small male lion alliances, whereas kin selection appears to be of greater importance in the formation and maintenance of larger collations. Adding to the variability of male alliances, some species such as bottlenose dolphins form at least two levels of male alliances. Scientists suggest that the different levels of alliances in bottlenose dolphins have risen from different evolutionary contexts.

Such benefits may include more effective female guarding which in turn further enhances the reproductive success of alliance members. There have been many hypotheses set forward to explain the formation and stability of male alliances, most notably kin selection, direct reciprocity and mutualism. While there are many factors that dictate the formation and stability of male reproductive alliances, scientists propose that the formation of male alliances is largely a result of a need for males to cooperate in order gain access to females.

However, there are extraordinary cases in which cooperation is favorable such as outlined in red howler monkey, savanna baboon , lion and bottlenose dolphin communities. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Contrasting relatedness patterns in bottlenose dolphins Tursiops sp.

Biological Sciences , — Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. Science , —3 Adaptive advantages of cooperative courtship for subordinate male lance-tailed manakins. American Society of Naturalists , —32 Alliance membership and kinship in wild male bottlenose dolphins Tursiops aduncus of southeastern Australia. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences , —7 The reproductive consequences of male cooperation in the red howler monkey: Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 27, — Why do male Cape ground squirrels live in groups?

Animal Behavior — Cooperation in male lions: Animal Behavior 49, 95— Behavior , — Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 48, — Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 44, 43—55 Cooperation and competition within coalitions of male lions: Nature , 74—