UKRI forgotten protected characteristics?

[sauceyorange]

I've just looked at our university's application form for covid related extension funding. Usual stuff except for the equalities monitoring bit which says UKRI wishes to take note of demographics for monitoring purposes. (No doubt given recent scandals). Anyway, q1 is what is your gender, male female or other gender identity. Has anyone else seen this or is it an invention of my own employer?

Gender identity is obviously not a protected characteristic, and I'm minded to reply correcting the form. What's the point of collecting data which are meaningless for equalities monitoring?

I haven't seen/looked for this particular example. However I have experienced something similar recently from a scientific journal, which I posted about here.

Thanks

Some very useful replies to your thread which I'll use!

I think that the covid funding extensions are a university process and in our uni we have come up with the processes, forms etc. Not sure about this specific form yet, but will try and find out