Inspired by a recent email by Melissa Gira about doing something “for the story of it,” I present you with… my decision-making flowchart:
It’s here — the holiday of all holidays — Geek New Year. The intersection of the end of SXSW Interactive and St. Patrick’s Day, when everyone who made the annual pilgrimage to Austin, TX is wandering home, rubbing their eyes and thinking a thousand new thoughts about how the coming year will be. And drinking.
I skipped SXSW this year, and didn’t miss it much. But apparently, 2009 Me took some steps to keep 2010 Me in the loop just so I wouldn’t feel left out. I woke up this morning to an email I’d sent myself a year ago using FutureMe.org. The subject line read, “listenupmotherfucker.” (And I’m such a nice person to everyone else…)
If you’ve watched me twitter on New Years, you know I make a grandiose attempt to discourage everyone in the world from making resolutions. Resolutions are often about picking something really hard that you feel guilty about, and throwing yourself at it drunkenly with all your might, only to fail in about a month. What does that really do, besides pull a few muscles and prove your incompetence? We need better traditions.
Mine is writing a letter to myself a year in the future. I include reminders, predictions, ideas, requests, and stories I want to carry forward. It’s me having an ongoing, ritualized conversation between the past, the present, and the future, and I love it. I love watching my own story unfold in a correspondence with myself over time.
Except last year I fucked it up.
Last year I forgot to write myself a letter on New Years, and it bugged me for months. So on March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day and the end of SXSWi, after two weeks of traveling, I decided that despite being too wrecked to move, I could see the whole timeline of my life Very Clearly and had a LOT to say about it.
Here’s the letter I received this morning (with a few light revisions to make it more bloggable):
From: Sarah Dopp
To: Sarah Dopp
Date: March 17, 2010
Subj: From me to me, listenupmotherfucker.Dear FutureMe,
It’s the last night of SXSW and I’m a fucking zombie. I’ve been traveling for two weeks — first a week in Portland and now this. Roomed with Melissa, Boffery’s a madman of vision, and Genderfork is exploding with passion. I want my Dopp Juice voice back. Queer Open Mic is getting its sea legs again, and occasionally I think about book deals and self-publishing. I’m speaking soon on gender and sexuality ambiguities, and in general, my life’s pretty fucking cool.
So why am I so stoned on exhaustion that I can’t even pack my fucking suitcase?
Okay, listen up. I skipped the letter from New Years so this one’s a few months late. Here’s the deal. You’re reading this in 2010, right? Shut up and keep talking. That’s my brilliant plan. Just do that, and you’ll be fine.
No, seriously, though. Here’s what you need to know:
1) Stop calling yourself an entrepreneur. It’s bullshit.
2) Don’t go back to school, even if you know you can. It’s bullshit, and you have better ways to spend your time.
3) If you forget the different between following your heart and doing what seems right, go read XKCD’s Fuck That Shit again.
4) If you get stuck, go read the Cult of Done Manifesto again.
5) Genderfork Book. Build the community. Meetups, volunteers, whatever.
6) Go talk to [redacted] about representing a community that you don’t see yourself as a complete representative of.
7) You can do this. You have to. You don’t know how not to.
Stay alive. I love you.
Sarah
p.s. I really like The Squeeze right now.
I must have been very tired, because I have absolutely no recollection of writing this.
I’m particularly fond of the line, “Shut up and keep talking. That’s my brilliant plan. Just do that, and you’ll be fine.”
And aside from that… yeah… this is how I talk to myself.
Go write your letter now. It’s a new New Year.
A year ago, I wrote an open letter to Silicon Valley, asking people to stop and think about how they’re handling gender (and race, for that matter) in their community websites. The short version is that if you’re requiring users to select their gender from a drop-down menu that has two options in it, you’re alienating some people. I didn’t offer alternative solutions at the time — it was just a request for everyone to think about it.
(Note: if you’re not clear on why gender is a complicated issue in data collection, please stop right now and go read that other post before continuing. This will make a lot more sense after you do so.)
After grappling with this problem on a few other projects, and talking about it in a session last week at She’s Geeky (I called it “My gender broke your drop-down menu…”), I’d like to now offer my suggested alternatives.
Alternatives to asking for a user’s gender in a required two-option drop-down menu…
Option 1: Make it Optional
Baby steps. If the idea of getting fancy with your data collection method gives you nightmares, just remove the red asterisk. Stop making it required! Most people will still answer the question, and those who don’t want to will select not to. Put a plan in place for how to treat and account for those who don’t want to declare their genders, and you’re done. It’s not the most celebratory or inclusive measure, but it is a very clean way to resolve a lot of problems.
Option 2: Don’t Ask At All
Instead of asking for gender, ask for what you actually want to know.
Is it what honorific should precede the person’s name? Well, then gender’s not going to tell you if they’re a doctor or a reverend, is it? Give them a comprehensive list of options, and allow them to select none, if they wish. (And really, why do we use these again? My preference is to drop them entirely.)
Is it what marketing you think they’ll respond best to? Newsflash: not every woman likes baking, and not every man likes cars. Ask them about their interests and market to them on that basis, instead.
Is gender not actually relevant at all, except that you think it makes for an interesting statistic? Meh. I’d like to convince you that you really shouldn’t touch it, but if I’m not going to win that argument, please see Option 1.
Option 3: Have a Third Option
Your drop-down menus can have more than two options. Some people are trying three.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and here’s my current position:
- “Other” is a poor choice for a third option. Why? Because gender-nonconforming people are othered enough as it is.
- A more useful choice would be “Decline to State” (or something similar) — then it’s not about non-conformity, it’s about privacy.
- But taking this a bit further, I’d like to submit “It’s Complicated” for consideration as the new third option. Most gender-nonconforming types will smile at you for it. It tells them you understand.
I’ve seen some people try to implement a “lots of options” dropdown menu, but I don’t really recommend this route, for two reasons:
- What if someone looks at the list and doesn’t identify with any of the words? You just alienated them much further than your male/female dropdown menu was doing before.
- What if someone identifies as more than one thing on the list? Take, for example, a transsexual woman who is proud to identify as a woman. Are you really going to make her choose between “trans” and “woman”? Come on now. That’s insulting.
If you change it from a drop-down menu (“pick only one”) to a checkbox menu (“select all that apply”), you solve issue #2, but you still have issue #1 to grapple with. And let me tell you: if you think you can come up with a finite list of all the possible gender identities in the world, you’re wrong.
Option 4: Redesign the System
So you’re convinced that “male/female” is a deeply flawed data breakdown for the purpose of your website, but you want people to assert their identities, and you want them to get personal about it. Okay, then! Time to scrap the dropdowns and do something new. Here are some ideas…
A “gender spectrum” slider bar. Take a look at how Blackbox Republic is structuring their sexual identity data:
I could see a similar thing done with “masculine” and “feminine” at each end, and letting people self-identify.
Note: one huge problem with the spectrum model is that it’s too flat. I believe there are people who have “a lot of gender” (i.e. dripping both masculinity and femininity all over the place) and “not a lot of gender” (i.e. minimizing signals of any gender whatsoever), and on the spectrum, they might look the same. But that brings up my next idea, which is…
A second dropdown that asks how important gender is to them. Take a look at how OkCupid handles religion. You get one dropdown menu for how you identify, and a second dropdown menu for how important it is to you. For some people, their gender is a strongly identifying factor in their lives. For others, it’s nearly irrelevant. What if we just started asking that question?
You could also…
Get fancy and use Kreative Korp’s SGOSelect menu (or some variation on it), which basically says: if you have a traditional identity, you can use the simple form. And if you want to get more specific, you can switch over to the Advanced form:
… but it still runs into the “finite number of options” problem, even in the Advanced view.
And that brings me to my last suggestion, which so far seems to be my holy grail. I worked this out with my co-founder team at Boffery while we were strategizing the user interface… with some outside input from Kirrily Robert of Freebase:
An open-ended tagging field that suggests words as you type. I want to be able to define my gender as “female, androgynous, genderqueer.” And I believe that if we were all encouraged to, we would come up with a great rich vocabulary that uniquely characterizes ourselves in all the ways a two-option gender set is trying to do, but failing at. If the tagging system were set up to automatically suggest words as you typed, you could either loop in to what others are saying and be associated with that group, or create your own words and add them to the lexicon. The result would be a rich mix of groupable/categorizable labels (marketers: this is far more meaningful than what you’re currently working with), along with the ability for us to self-identify however we want.
I don’t have a picture for you ‘cuz it hasn’t been built yet. But if anyone understands what I’m talking about and wants to test it out, let me know.
I want in.
Love,
Sarah
ETA: immediately after I posted this, a designer took a stab at the open-ended tagging field idea and sent me early concept mockups. Check ’em out!