IMHO you need at least five values: Male Female Unknown (aka NULL) Not Available Not Applicable
BTW, my wife's grandfather's given name was "Pearl". A few years ago I taught a lesson to a group of about 30 third grade students. There were 6 students in that class with a first name pronounced like "Meagan", though there were 4 different spellings of it. Only 5 of them were girls. -- Mike Nolan On 12/8/06, Jorge Godoy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Madison Kelly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Some people argue that gender is a spectrum. If you want to be very > inclusive. Maybe you could use a 'float' and stick with 0 = woman, 1 = man > (self documenting after all) with the option of '0.1 - 0.9' for people who > feel "in between". How efficient is 'float'? This would also work for animals > that fall outside then normal male/female designation. Then you can use NULL to represent unknown information but you miss the other possibility that was pointed out: the person refused to inform the gender. To cover all these possibilities with one single column we need a set of discrete states. -- Jorge Godoy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
