Beth Granter

Freelance digital consultant for charities


spock is rubbish at identity politics as well


And here’s another example of a failed sign up dialogue in terms of identity politics and gender diversity:

Radio buttons? With only two options and I have to choose one? And the default is Male? So I’m forced to declare myself as one or the other. How rubbish. Here’s a couple of suggestions for improvement:

Or even better:

Or even don’t bother asking in the first place! At least not in the initial sign up. You could let people enter this information about themselves by choice later on. So far Pownce is winning the gender game. I know I keep reporting on all the sign-up dialogues being crap for promoting gender diversity, but when I’ve seen enough of these I think I’ll make a table of winners and losers in gender awareness in sign ups / personal profile sites’ UI.

_____________EDIT______________

Aha! on logging in, turns out you can un-define your gender in your profile settings.  So that is a good thing, but you still shouldn’t have to choose one in the first place.  It’s a bit weird that you can choose ‘nothing’ later on, but not initially.  Also it’s still not perfect because you might want to define yourself as Transgendered or something else and because you can’t this is giving preferential treatment to males and females.


3 responses to “spock is rubbish at identity politics as well”

  1. In any case, making fun of Spock is a bit like making fun of the fat kid in gym class…

    I haven’t seen them get all that much right, so far. You?

  2. Ha, well, the gendered toilet situation is a big campaign amongst gender queers. That question would just be taking the unnecessary gender division in the pub toilets and putting it into a website.

    My answer would actually be “whichever queue is shorter”… but the toilet campaign is about how there should be unisex toilets everywhere so trans people aren’t forced to choose one or the other and FTM (female to male) transgendered people don’t get stuck in a bloke’s loo on their period without a tampon machine available.

  3. Or what about an alternative question:

    “when going to the toilet down the pub do you go to the (a) gents (b) ladies (c) what ever takes your mood”

    🙂

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