Re: Male/female

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(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Madison Kelly <linux(at)alteeve(dot)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(at)gmail(dot)com>
>
>
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