Morgan Klaus. Scheuerman
University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States
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.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445742
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)