Removing Gender

As an IT consultant, my job often involves clarifying with clients exactly what it is they want a software system to do, and contribute suggestions because, quite often, what they think they want isn't actually what they want. Today, while meeting with a client for this purpose, we discussed a piece of their software which allowed them to search for a person in their database.

The criteria for searching were pretty typical: first name, surname, etc. That is, except for one particular field - gender. My clients had asked for the ability to search by gender.

Now, it's not my place to tell clients what to do as such; moreso, I'm there to, well, consult. So I pointed out the gender criterion and subtly asked if having to specify gender was actually how they wanted the searching to work. And they sat there and thought for a moment, blinking as though wondering why they'd included gender at all.

And the reason? They had no idea. In their case, there was no practical use for searching by gender (it wasn't as though the clients were running a dating service or anything). If anything, it's rather impractical to have to specify someone's gender when searching for their records, especially if you only have a(n often ethnic) name to go by.

So we struck it off the list. Gone. No more having to discriminate by gender when searching.

A part of me recognises that this was some sort of overlapping line between social traditions (where gender has historically - for whatever reason - been part of identifying someone) and social reality (where it doesn't make sense for a modern business like this particular client to distinguish between male and female). The rest of me is just happy because we got rid of a silly search field and made some clients lives easier.