Revisiting Gendered Web Forms: An Evaluation of Gender Inputs with (Non-)Binary People
By Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, J. Jiang, Katta Spiel, Jed R. Brubaker. 2021
39 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Gender input forms act as gates to accessing information, websites, and services online. Non-binary people regularly have to interact with them, though many do not offer non-binary gender options. This results in non-binary individuals having to either choose an incorrect gender category or refrain from using a site or service—which is occasionally infeasible (e.g., when accessing health services). We tested five different forms through a survey with binary and non-binary participants (n = 350) in three contexts—a digital health form, a social media website, and a dating app. Our results indicate that the majority of participants found binary “male or female” forms exclusive and uncomfortable to fill out across all contexts. We conclude with design considerations for improving gender input forms and consequently their underlying gender model in databases. Our work aims to sensitize designers of (online) gender web forms to the needs and desires of non-binary people.
Subfields: Communication, Gender Studies, Human-Computer Interaction
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Citations in the corpus
- Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies (2021, neutral): “While existing research has surveyed non-binary individuals on the harms of gendered web forms (Scheuerman et al., 2021), there is no precedent for our survey on language technology harms, so our primary intent with this sample of respondents was to assess the efficacy of our survey design.”
- Towards Intersectionality in Machine Learning: Including More Identities, Handling Underrepresentation, and Performing Evaluation (2022, background): “While on some dataset and algorithm combinations it is best to give the algorithm the most granular set of racial labels, in others it can actually benefit to use a more coarse set of labels. of which have associated harms [4, 13, 54, 93, 107, 108].”