Tiny Victory

[Jerabilis]

I’m currently undertaking a Masters. A couple of months ago we had an email circulated asking for participants for a research study - it was asking for people who “identified as female”.

I replied in a spirit of honest enquiry as to how you could identify as female, wondering for example if it meant you’d actually had your chromosomes tested.

I never got a reply and was too busy to follow up but this week we’ve had another email circulated from the same team asking for participants for the same study. Rather than asking for participants who identify as female they have used “identify as women”. I think I might be brave and challenge this too but it feels like I’ve at least managed to hold on to the term female!

This is bonkers. Its supposed to be for research so presumably they need it to be single sex for a good reason - and then let anyone participate?

It's still unclear, if the research is dependent on participants being XX then the want women or females otherwise they should just ask for anyone.

But good on you for pushing back.

They obviously want someone who identifies as a woman.
Not someone who is a woman

Why is that obvious? It seems possible that they are looking for women but either are trying to be inclusive (and accepting the risk of lower survey usefulness), or are just using inclusive language without having any thoughts whatsoever on the meaning behind it.

Surely a research study should be specific, otherwise they could just bung it on Survey Monkey.

Thank you for trying. It is important to ask questions as you did politely and in a good team spirit. But as a data manager I am horrified what crap data is being collected.

I give examples: shoe fashion and shopping. It might be useful as a shoe manufacturer to understand a new trend towards larger sizes in womenswear. I might need to tool my factory differently. So fair enough. Although one could argue that immigration patterns and ethnicities might provide equally useful data.

Contrast to: Research into medical matters affecting one sex. If you have self-identifying people in that survey you run the risk of diluting the population. So eg 100 women asked about heavy periods and 5 reply that is 5%. If your population then changes and you have 80 born females and 20 self-id-ing - the same 5% then becomes 4% in the total population. That reduces the importance (incorrectly of course).

So definitely context is critical.

Thanks all, I have some plans to continue pushing back in the spirit of volunteering for the study. Given my job I need to be careful about how much I push but I think it’s important to keep going where I can.

I'd get back to them and politely ask them to clarify whether they're trying to attract biological women or trans women or both. term 'identity as women' is totally ambiguous so the above is a valid question. What is the study about?