Sounds horrible to me. Gender is either male of female. There is no gender called "Ada Lovelace" and no gender called "yes" (haha, you are such a funny guy..).<p>Now i'd like to search for all male people from germany with interests in IT. Oh what? Some of them wrote "male" some wrote "man" and what not? Wait, that doesn't work anymore?
I very much hope the freetext form is banned again..
If people want to express that they are funny or "special" they can do that in another textfield, like self description, but not in the gender textfield, that's just stupid and NOT well thought of.<p>Internationalization is another nightmare here. People will put the gender in their local language in that field. Great.
<i>Four years ago, at my first rails job, I worked at a company with a mostly-lesbian customer base. It turns out, in that context, knowing if someone is “male” or “female” gives you almost no useful information. The lesbian community has other widely-accepted categories of gender, but the company’s internal order tracking software — a well-known package from a national vendor — offered only male or female.</i><p>I kind of wished this part had been elaborated on. I think this is the most interesting and salient point in this piece.
Jives nicely with this recent post about classification and allowing for ambiguity: <a href="http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/11/23/4827/data-cleanup-and-allowing-for-ambiguity" rel="nofollow">http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/11/23/4827/data-c...</a>
The real answer here is to change the field name to "Sex" which only has two possible outcomes based on what biological reproductive role you fill. While it could technically be three, adding a blank would solve this.