All Genders—First.

Since the beginning of survey time, we’ve all thought gender questions were cut and dry. But they aren’t. We’ve been forcing people to make a choice among an insufficient set of answer options.

Classic survey mistake. And now it’s up to us, as an industry, to correct it.

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What is your gender? 

[SINGLE PUNCH]

1. Male
2. Female

We’ve all seen this before. And at Bovitz, we’ve decided to do something about it.

Prompted by the recent California ruling to legally recognize a third gender (non-binary), we realized that there is an entire segment of the population that we’ve been misclassifying and mistreating. And to us, this was simply not ok. We operate on a strong belief that people—of all gender classifications—should come first in everything we do. We take that very seriously. So, for us, the question wasn’t about if we needed to address this shift in gender definitions, but rather how we would address it.  

The fact is, this binary gender question is ingrained in how our industry thinks about people, how it categorizes them, and how it analyzes them. There are all kinds of logistical barriers to disrupting that system. To even start breaking down those barriers is to be bombarded with a slew of questions:

• How do we revise the question?
• How do we approach gender as a screening criterion?
• Can it even be in the screener, or should it come at the end?
• How do we set quotas for a sampling plan?
• How do we think about gender subgroup analysis?

And that’s just the beginning. These questions are tough, but they’re important. They’re so important that we figured we would be able to find some guidance on them from academia or published white papers, but it seems as though our industry—and the field of public opinion more broadly—is still sorting through all these questions themselves.

Well, for us, this issue is too important to wait.

So, we’re tackling it question by question, starting with the actual question: What is your gender? By crowdsourcing this task internally and relying heavily on the empathetic perspectives of those in the LGBTQ community, we think we’ve come up with a solution:

What is your gender? 

[SINGLE PUNCH]

1. Male
2. Female
3. Non-binary
4. Other

And implementing it starts today. There are still questions to be answered and issues to be resolved, but there’s no better day to start putting people first than today. Everything else will come.

And like we said, this can’t just be a change that our company alone makes. We all need to; from panel providers to research buyers to other firms like us, we all have an obligation to represent people for who they truly are. That is, fundamentally, our job. But even beyond the call of duty, it’s just the right thing to do.

So, let’s do it together. Let us know how you’re thinking about measuring gender in your research. Let us know what complications you’re grappling with; let us know what solutions you’re developing.

Let us know how you’re making changes that put people, of all gender classifications, first.