“What is your gender?” Diversity monitoring

[WarmYourBumUp]

Does anyone else get infuriated by this? Filling in diversity monitoring information, and being asked “What is your gender?”. Today I am accessing support from a charity whose agent asked on their web chat. I said “I don’t have a gender, I am of the female sex”.
She replied “Shall I mark you down as transgender” 🙄 I said no, gender means nothing to me. I am of the female sex, gender does not exist.
She asked what she should put for gender then as they don’t have sex in their monitoring. So I said to put down that I haven’t participated in the diversity monitoring.
I refuse to partake in any sort of gender nonsense, and I take a hard line on it. It astounds me that organisations still have this question, and don’t record sex.
It REALLY infuriates me that if you don’t believe in gender you must be transgender.

When will this nonsense end

I try to respond with:
"how can you do diversity or equality monitoring if you do not record the protected characteristic of sex"?

She replied “Shall I mark you down as transgender”

That doesn't even make sense anyway, as transgender is not a gender in the first place.

I’m battling similar at the moment. They can record both, but shouldn’t record just gender not sex.

I don’t have a gender. I have a sex though.

For jobs at the Financial Times the monitoring form has

Gender Identity
Agender/ Genderfluid/ Genderqueer /Man /Non-binary/ Woman/ Other

This is the result of American prudity around sex combined with the British sense of humour.

If you ask "Sex?", some Americans might die of embarrassment and most British people will answer "Yes please" 😂😂😂

So we changed it to Gender when there were only 2 and now look where we are 😞

This is the way to go.
I have challenged previous employers and regulatory bodies (yes, Social work England, looking at you) who were only collecting data on gender identity and not sex. It took a long time, but my employers did change. I also recommend sending the organisation concerned a summary of Prof Alice Sullivan’s report on the need to always collect data on sex and also on gender identity where necessary.

I usually select “other” and write in my sex is female. Or only male and female exist. I’m female.

I agree - that is my approach.

I spent a long time, when working in a senior-but-semi-detached role in one of the big regulators arguing that it was important to record sex as well as gender (gender was all they recorded and they argued they could infer sex if people said their gender aligned with what they were assigned at birth). It took several years of arguing about utter ridiculousness but eventually HR conceded that the world would not end if - in addition to continuing to include several questions about gender identity, of course - they included a question about the protected category of sex.

Challenging the organisation formally is important, as MimiGC did, successfully.👏

The people who hand out/process the forms aren't the ones who wrote them, it's somebody Further Up, and we need to go at least one step Even Further Up to get data collection changed.

I'm a great believer in keeping complaints short, snappy and businesslike, e.g. just some key points from Prof Sullivan about the need to collect data on sex, with a link to the report.

And it's good to present things as being beneficial to the organisation, whether by not putting themselves at odds with the EA2010 [e.g. dodgy genderist DEI training], or in this case 'missing out on vital information about their target market' or some business-y blurb like that.

Have I got this right @AlexandraLeaving - they asked a question about gender and asked if that 'matched your sex assigned at birth' so they could then work out what your sex is? And all the while it would have been so much simpler to ask 'sex'.

This of course only works if they only allow binary man/woman responses to their gender question.

If they are more creative around gender (see FT examples above) then it will fail.

I wish you were wrong @Rightsraptor but yes. Sex - in the unlikely event that something so trivial could be needed - was extrapolated from your gender identity (Q1) and whether your gender matched your 'gender assigned at birth' (Q2).

It was all part of a wider package of madness that I can't fully describe without being outing. And, while I made some improvements while I was there, there are still problems because some people just don't get it. Makes me so mad.

Yes, definitely go the top of the EDI hierarchy, if you’re working in a large organisation that has one. Otherwise, if you start at the bottom, they just pass it up the chain themselves, as they are terrified of getting it wrong and offending anyone. Also if you ask questions (in my case, it was ‘as you are not collecting data on the sex of employees, how are you going to monitor the ongoing problem of sexism?’) again they get passed up the chain for an answer . So go straight to the top, keep it short and pose at least one question they’ll find it difficult to answer.

Sounds similar to private energy company SSE; their recent EDI training asked employees "Please select the gender identity you most identify with:"

The options were then: Female, Male, non binary, Other term preferred and Prefer not to say. Then went on to ask "If you prefer to self describe your gender identity please specify here:".

Absolute and utter nonsense!!!! Person who told me about this said they were eye rolling as they filled it in. Makes no sense and it just pisses me off as a data analyser as it means that there is no true gathering of data for any meaningful analysis.

They just need
Sex M/F
Gender Reassignment - have you or are you in the process of having your gender reasigned : No/not applicable, Yes MtoF, Yes FtoM.

Go for the organisational arse-covering angle. Gender identity is not a protected characteristic so what is their basis for holding that data? If they don’t have one they are potentially breaching their data obligations.

I always select other (if available ) then write in “my sex is female”