Steve Desjardins wrote:
> I've been told by some of my social scientist friends that the correct
> term is "sex", i.e., the answer to "are you amle or female?".
It really depends on what you're trying to measure. Quite
often that would be the wrong question, and even when it's
the right question, unless you attach a definition to the
survey, it can be confusing.
("Confusing?" I hear folks ask ... well yeah, if you really
do mean _sex_ -- i.e. biology -- do you mean morphological
sex, hormonal sex, or genetic sex? Each of those can be a
valid or invalid definition depending on just what it is
that you are trying to measure. And you still need at least
three categories (the easy cop-out is to lump lots of things
under "other"), because of various intersex phenomena. That
is, even if you want to limit things to morphological birth-
sex, you've got at least five categories that show up often
enough to count (something like 1% of births is still a lot
of people), and if you mean genetics, there's Kleinfelter
syndrome (somewhere around 0.1% of births). And then you've
got the questions of which sex a post-op transsexual counts
as: if you're trying to figure out which bathroom they'll
use and which sex acts they can perform without props,
morphological sex matters; if you're screening for sex-linked
genetic disease, chromosomal sex matters. If you're trying
to get pregnant, both matter, and hormonal issues enter the
picture. And if you're trying to decide whether someone is
allowed to attend a women's music festival, then *politics*
gets stirred into the pot, but I digress... )
Note that outside of _medical_ contexts it's almost always
morphological sex that matters when you actually mean sex at
all, and more often than that it's actually gender that's
meant in the first place.
I'm surprised that a _social_ scientist would say to use sex.
After all, aren't social scientists usually more concerned
with whether a subject is a man or woman, rather than whether
they're male or female? And man/woman is a _gender_ thing.
> Evidently
> sex is a pure physical discitnction whereas gender refers to the
> psychological, behavioral, or cutltural traits associated with the
> sexes, so that then latter is a continuous and not a binary variable.
Well, depending on your model of gender, it can be considered a
continuous one-dimensional variable, a discrete multidimensional
variable, or a continuous multidimensional variable. (Okay, it
can also be modelled as a discrete but non-binary linear variable,
but I don't find that model at all useful.) Note that the BSRI
(Bem Sex Roles Inventory, named for its creator, Sandra Bem)
treats it as a two-dimensional continuous variable, allowing for
(varying degrees of) both "bi-gendered" and "ungendered" in the
'middle' ground between (varying degrees of) masculine and
feminine. (It does not, as I recall, distinguish between
"bi-gendered" and "inter-gendered", nor really allow for "strongly
female-identified butch", so even the BSRI is just a starting
place. But hey, I suspect even Bem would agree that the tool
is outdated now.)
So which do we mean if we want to gather statistical information
about the PDML membership? Are we tallying penes, or asking
how many men and women are on the list? I *think* we're more
interested in gender than sex here, but hey, if I'm wrong I'm
wrong. Could make for a cool X-rated PUG theme though, if it's
really pudenda we want to count, eh? But no, I really think we
want to count gender here.
Either way, there need to be at least three choices. If anyone
besides me is interested in a more comprehensive list of options
for statistics-gathering, we can discuss that, but just adding
"other" and/or "no response" as valid options at least makes
the survey possible for folks like me to fill out _accurately_.
-- Glenn
PS: Why yes, I have thought about this (and read, and listened)
quite a lot and consider it important. I write letters of
complaint when sex/gender is a _required_ field on a computerized
form (including web forms), and have been known to pencil in a
box for "other" on paper forms. The proposed PDML survey, if it
ever does happen, isn't a Big Important Deal, but awareness of
the issues for the next time someone here has input to the design
of a form is something I do care about. It's partly a matter of
personal distaste for bad science ("Oh look, your data are
guaranteed to be incorrect for some subset of your respondents!"),
partly a cultural/institutional _invisibility_ issue ("How can
they know whether we number enough to be taken into account if
they have no way of even counting us or finding out we exist?"),
and partly a matter of privacy ("If all I'm doing is registering
to use a free article archive on the web, why do you even need
to know my sex/gender at all?")
