IMHO you need at least five values:
Male
Female
Unknown (aka NULL)
Not Available
Not Applicable
BTW, my wife's grandfather's given name was "Pearl".
A few years ago I taught a lesson to a group of about 30 third grade students. There were 6 students in that class with a first name pronounced like "Meagan", though there were 4 different spellings of it. Only 5 of them were girls.
--
Mike Nolan
On 12/8/06, Jorge Godoy <jgodoy@gmail.com> wrote: Madison Kelly <linux@alteeve.com> writes:
> Some people argue that gender is a spectrum. If you want to be very
> inclusive. Maybe you could use a 'float' and stick with 0 = woman, 1 = man
> (self documenting after all) with the option of '0.1 - 0.9' for people who
> feel "in between". How efficient is 'float'? This would also work for animals
> that fall outside then normal male/female designation.
Then you can use NULL to represent unknown information but you miss the other
possibility that was pointed out: the person refused to inform the gender. To
cover all these possibilities with one single column we need a set of discrete
states.
--
Jorge Godoy <jgodoy@gmail.com>
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