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maxtance / pe

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Application assumes gender is binary. Moreover, the parameter is not optional. #3

Open maxtance opened 1 year ago

maxtance commented 1 year ago

Since the parameter for gender is not optional, I can only assign Male or Female to a student/prof/ta. This poses a problem if the individual does not identify as a Male or Female.

It can be even more problematic if a user is using the application to track their social circle and identifies the friend with the wrong pronouns.

nus-se-bot commented 1 year ago

Team's Response

This is only a mere suggestion and does not affect the functionality of our application. In any case, the tag feature can always be used to include any gender the person identifies with.

Technically, gender is not tied to pronouns, someone who identifies as male can choose the pronouns "them/ they". Our app does not include a pronoun field.

Furthermore, NUS records students as only either Male or Female. According to official statistic potrayed by NUS registar office, there is only male or female students. As our target audience are NUS Computing students, we would align ourselves to the university's characterisation of gender among students.

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Source for screenshot: https://www.nus.edu.sg/registrar/docs/info/student-statistics/enrolment-statistics/undergraduate-studies/ug-enrol-20202021.pdf

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.Rejected]

Reason for disagreement: This might be a sensitive issue to discuss, but I personally feel that the application is not inclusive to all genders as it leaves out a subset of the target audience and hence a low severity was given.

It is important to note the difference between Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity. "Sex refers to a person's biological status and is typically assigned at birth, usually on the basis of external anatomy" and "Gender is often defined as a social construct of norms, behaviors and roles that varies between societies and over time" (source: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/996319297/gender-identity-pronouns-expression-guide-lgbtq#:~:text=Gender%20is%20often%20categorized%20as,not%20outwardly%20visible%20to%20others.). In the context of Singapore (and NUS in the team's given example), an individual's sex is either Male or Female. But gender (which is what the team uses in their application) extends beyond that.

Allowing an "Others" option or making the field optional makes the application more inclusive, where the Tag feature can complement (but not replace) the Gender field.