TITLE: Gender and Technology SUBTITLE: How technology influences sexuality and vice versa AUTHOR: Meitar "maymay" Moscovitz PUBLICATION DATE: January, 2009 COPYRIGHT: Copyright © 2011 by Meitar Moscovitz. Some Rights Reserved. LICENSE: CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ SCRIPT: I'd like to start a conversation with you about two of my favorite things: sex and technology. More specifically, I want to talk about how the technology we build influences people's sexuality, and how our sexuality returns the favor, influencing the technology we build. As it happens, it turns out the two are linked in ways you may not have realized before. Some obvious examples of this are in the assumptions inherent in user interface options for selecting sex or gender for your profile on a site like Facebook (what some call "Sex 1.0") versus the options on a site like FetLife ("Sex 2.0"). Before we get too far into that, however, it's worth asking, "Why is thinking about gender options for social networking profiles relevant today?" It's important because, for the first time in human history, people are able to explore and experiment with sociosexual interactions in a physically zero-risk environment, free of assumptions we'd otherwise be unable to avoid in the physical world. Moreover, technologists have the power to create new ideals of normalcy and change the way people think about their identities, their relationships, and their lives. Perhaps the most obvious example of this phenomenon in action is how youth culture embraced what the corporate establishment calls "piracy", but that we call "sharing." If an app, like a peer-to-peer file sharing client, is "good," it becomes part of the way people live. Now, there's lots going on with gender and technology today, with sites coming up everywhere! BeyondMasculinity.com is an online publication featuring essays on gender and politics. BedPosted.com is a web app that lets people keep meticulous, shareable records about their sexual encounters. Genderfork.com is a collaborative blog exploring gender variance through photography. Safe2Pee.org allows people to locate safe bathrooms within their communities, because gender variant people often face harassment when all they want is to go pee. And it's not just technology, but culture too: BarCamp has inspired QueerCamp and other unconferences like KinkForAll.org. To give you an idea of how diverse people are, the Yay! Genderform web site catalogues exactly 925 options of sexual and gender identities. Each option can be combined with any other option—its interface uses checkboxes instead of a drop-down menu to let you self-identify your gender. This yields a total of 2.8363×10278 or 283 unnovemgintillion possible combinations, more than the number of elementary particles in the universe. If each option were a computer bit, it would take 116 bytes to encode a single person's gender choices. In contrast, ISO 5218, the current IT standard of "Codes for the representation of human sexes" (there is no published standard for gender) defines 4 mutually exclusive options. While records using this standard can be encoded in only 2 bits and thus may seem more "efficient" to the short-sighted technologist, the incredible scale of the problems it causes is beyond measure. Thing is, those 923 other options aren't new. They've existed forever, but it's because of the communication possible on the Internet that our society finally has the means to explore them. Telecommunication begets cyberspace communities, and this democratizing influence forces us to rethink a few things. This explosion of gender expression may feel confronting, or surprising, yet we've seen that from the very first BBS's to email and beyond, telecommunications technologies—social networks of all stripes—give people the ability to create personas, fictional or otherwise, of who and what they want to be or attract. People are simply being the people they are, speaking freer thanks to the cyber-anonymity they (think they) have, because they can't be any other way. So now I hope you can see how crazy it feels to some of us when we're confronted with web forms, like OkCupid's, which provide only two (mutually exclusive) options: male or female. Providing such options in a "gender" drop-down menu or radio buttons implies that people who don't fit in the boxes you specify are not important and therefore not welcome. Truly understanding all this requires that you dissect many assumptions. In point of fact, gender is not the same as sex and the words we use to communicate are the tools with which we teach each other—and our software—about ourselves, who we are, who we like, and why. For better or worse, all this gender stuff actually influences technology. Sam Hughes writes about examples of marriage database schemata that seemed logical to the people who designed them, but are also strikingly sexist. They often create two tables, one for "males" and one for "females," and then associate the two by referencing a "female" record that "belongs to" a male. But, at least in today's world, a "female" doesn't actually "belong to" a "male," right? Designing sexist systems might sound brain-dead and stupid, but it's actually how people think of gender issues today in their mind. They quite literally don't see different humans as being equal: When two men marry, they need to figure out which "is the wife" and so they literally imbue the code they write, and the technology they build, with rigidly gendered, technically inaccurate world views. In contrast to these systems, Sam's schema for a marriage database is completely free of gender and sexuality assumptions. Interestingly, extricating gender assumptions from the schema also permits, technologically speaking, any human to marry any other human, any number of times, and have any number of partners simultaneously. His gender-agnostic schema is far more technologically robust than a rigidly gendered one. Sadly, if you tried to use a database schema like Sam's, you'd actually be forced to write tons of application-layer logic to enforce the legal restrictions placed on marriage in most jurisdictions today. Gender binaries are limiting EVERYONE, not just genderqueer people. People who do marketing, social media, user experience design, customer service, etc., are all straight-jacketed by assumptions about gender. Among other things, these assumptions can severely impact their financial bottom line. Thankfully, people in all these fields and more are beginning to realize that our behavior doesn't extend solely from our anatomy, and they're acknowledging the presence of feminine men, masculine women, and the astounding diversity between the binary extremes of "man" and "woman." So what can you, as a technologist, do to "do things right?" Well, simply ask yourself some basic questions: What information am I really asking users for? Does the interface with which I'm asking for that information allow for an honest answer? And why am I even asking for this information in the place? These are questions experienced developers should be asking anyway—the rules of good design are not different for gender variant people. For instance, do you really care if a given customer has a penis if you're just trying to figure out how to address them when your customer service representative answers the phone? Does a Wi-Fi hotspot really have to ask for its users sex before it'll function? If your application doesn't need sexuality information, don't ask for it. Ultimately, it's up to us to build a world where we can either limit or accept the possibilities of the people we interact with. So I urge you to remember the robustness principle, and follow Postel's Law from RFC 793: "be liberal in what you accept." Put another way: DON'T LIMIT because, as Eddie Izzard has said, "there's gonna be a lot more guys with makeup during this millennium!" Not only are arbitrary limitations a bad user experience, you'll find enforcing them is often technically unsound, too.