Do you have a form or survey for which you are hoping to collect demographic information, such as gender? If your form only offers two options (such as “Male” and “Female”), it won’t reflect the full diversity of the students, staff and faculty at Stanford. Also, it can be frustrating for people not to see their own identities offered as an option.
Instead, take a moment to determine whether it is actually necessary to collect gender data. (Read this Daily article to help you think it through). Is it a vital component of your data collection or the identifying information you need to gather for participants? If not, just leave it off. If you are collecting gender data, we have provided several options below.
First, consider offering it as a fill-in-the-blank:
Gender: __________
The advantage of this option is that it allows people to self-identify with the gender label that they resonate with the most. The disadvantage is that if you will need to report on gender data in discrete categories, you will need to “clean” the data (group and categorize the responses) first.
A second-best option is to offer a non-binary gender option:
Gender:
- Female
- Male
- Both/Neither/Fluid
As you are probably aware, sex and gender are not synonymous (and strictly speaking, "male" and "female" are sex terms rather than gender terms, but we tend to use them interchangeably in our culture). If you need to know a person’s genetic or biological sex as well as their gender, you will need an additional question, such as:
Sex assigned at birth:
- Female
- Male
- Intersex
Not everyone who is transgender identifies primarily as such; some simply identify as male or female. If you want to identify the number of transgender people in your data, you would need to include all those who self-identify with any gender label that is different from the one they were assigned at birth, or ask a specific question regarding whether each participant self-identifies as transgender.
A third option is to offer several gender options:
Gender Identity
I identify as:
- Cisgender Female
- Transgender Female
- Cisgender Male
- Transgender Male
- Genderqueer/Fluid
- Questioning
- None of the above (please specify):___________________
This option may require you to include a short explanatory blurb, because not everyone is familiar with terms such as cisgender, genderqueer, etc. If you are struggling with what format best meets your needs, please feel free to send an email to Inge Hansen at lgbtcounseling@stanford.edu for a consultation.
