Person Name: Gender-specific formatting

Thu Dec 9 13:01:50 CST 2021

Hi Robert,

(I haven’t seen a response to this thread yet)

In the proposed PersonName spec, we have left gender out of the name formatting, as the spec is specific to the name only, and not the grammatical context of the surrounding text. The current spec expects the calling application to know, and provide the correctly formatted honorifics or gender-specific connector terms, such as “Farrah bint Ibrahim” vs “Mohammed bin Ibrahim”.  There is currently no accommodation for standard honorifics lists such as “Mr, Ms, Mrs, Mx, Dr”, etc.

But gender as part of a person object that happens to also contain the personName, and possibly variations of the personName (also-known-as, preferred-name, legal-name, birth-name, etc.) makes perfect sense.

What I have found on “standards” for gender enumeration are as follows:

  *   ISO 20022<https://www.iso20022.org/standardsrepository/type/GenderCode> – Financial Industry – only has male, female
  *   ISO 5218<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_5218>: not known, male, female, not applicable
  *   UK Deed Poll<https://deedpolloffice.com/change-name/changing-your-gender>: male, female, neither male nor female. NHS<https://datadictionary.nhs.uk/attributes/person_gender_code.html> appears to be using the ISO 5218 codes
  *   vCard4<http://microformats.org/wiki/gender-formats>: male, female, other, nor or not applicable, unknown

One thing to consider is that in the evolution of “diversity and inclusion” as part of user interface and data design, we now have the preferred pronoun as part of the expected de facto person descriptor (WorkDay link<https://blog.workday.com/en-us/2017/supporting-workday-customers-on-their-diversity-journeys.html>; example English<https://center.dso.iastate.edu/files/documents/2021-03/Guide%20to%20Pair%20Pronouns%20to%20the%20Preferred%20Name%20Field%20in%20Workday%202-24-21.pdf> implementation details.). This can affect the surrounding grammar as well. Pronouns can add plural grammar with “they/them” and indeterminate gender with new terms such as “ze/hir”. Good discussion at IBM<https://www.ibm.com/blogs/think/2020/07/gender-pronouns-how-small-words-make-a-big-difference/>.  Taking a look at the descriptors that go into person data in WorkDay<https://community.workday.com/sites/default/files/file-hosting/productionapi/Human_Resources/v37.1/Human_Resources.html> is insightful wrt names, gender, pronouns, etc.

Cheers,

Mike McKenna
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From: CLDR-Users <cldr-users-bounces at corp.unicode.org> on behalf of Robert Stepanek via CLDR-Users <cldr-users at corp.unicode.org>
Date: Wednesday, December 1, 2021 at 9:01 AM
To: cldr-users at corp.unicode.org <cldr-users at corp.unicode.org>
Cc: Mario Loffredo <mario.loffredo at iit.cnr.it>, Bron Gondwana <brong at fastmailteam.com>
Subject: Person Name: Gender-specific formatting
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Hi,

I am co-authoring an IETF standards draft to represent contacts and addressbook data (draft-ietf-jmap-jscontact<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ietf.org%2Farchive%2Fid%2Fdraft-ietf-jmap-jscontact-09.html&data=04%7C01%7Cmimckenna%40paypal.com%7C134d5f0b0f924f9d4fd008d9b4ebc5f0%7Cfb00791460204374977e21bac5f3f4c8%7C0%7C0%7C637739748806289685%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=jdWyhMpncGHTm2zmuSb8aYvdg16NjI5vjK93oohSCfI%3D&reserved=0>). It aims to provide a backward-compatible alternative to the widely used VCARD contacts data format (RFC 6350<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdatatracker.ietf.org%2Fdoc%2Fhtml%2Frfc6350&data=04%7C01%7Cmimckenna%40paypal.com%7C134d5f0b0f924f9d4fd008d9b4ebc5f0%7Cfb00791460204374977e21bac5f3f4c8%7C0%7C0%7C637739748806299640%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=fs%2B4krjeExB7ynp3APyKs0xHmAzUwQBz1tUs20fsRVg%3D&reserved=0>). I see that Unicode PRI 434 has an open issue with regards to gender-specific formatting, and I would appreciate if we could share our findings in that area.

One unresolved issue in our RFC draft is how to indicate the grammatical gender to use when addressing a name. This may be required to choose a honorific such as "Mr." or "Mrs." (in case the name object does not explicitly state them). Also, in some languages a grammatical gender is required for salutations (e.g. "Liebe Anna" vs. "Lieber Robert" in German).

The VCARD standard defined a GENDER<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdatatracker.ietf.org%2Fdoc%2Fhtml%2Frfc6350%23section-6.2.7&data=04%7C01%7Cmimckenna%40paypal.com%7C134d5f0b0f924f9d4fd008d9b4ebc5f0%7Cfb00791460204374977e21bac5f3f4c8%7C0%7C0%7C637739748806299640%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=vDGQAmFiuzxFw3guXuInqQlzJ9PS1WM5TksvkLqekr4%3D&reserved=0> property to indicate the biological sex of a contact (and also a free-text value for gender). Some applications used this biological sex attribute to store and determine the grammatical gender of a contact. This is problematic because the biological sex and grammatical gender may not be equal. Also, the enumeration of allowed biological sex values seems poorly chosen, both in grammatical and biological contexts (e.g. "none", "other").

I wonder if a "grammaticalGender" field on a name might make sense?

It looks to me as if "male", "female", "neuter" would cover a large number of languages, but I also understand that some allow for more genders (e.g. according to this Wikipedia<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FGrammatical_gender%23Mostly_semantic_criteria&data=04%7C01%7Cmimckenna%40paypal.com%7C134d5f0b0f924f9d4fd008d9b4ebc5f0%7Cfb00791460204374977e21bac5f3f4c8%7C0%7C0%7C637739748806309597%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=adgONRPtZ1rHBPiqBBRtL%2BpVL%2FT5eSDb%2FzaiFECdio8%3D&reserved=0> entry the Zande language has four genders: male human, female human, animal and inanimate). Probably a free text-value in combination with a few predefined values for common genders could do the trick.  That being said, I am not educated in linguistics.

Could you please share your thoughts on gender-specific formatting in PRI434? At best, we could come to a solution that fits both standard works.

Thanks!
Robert

P.S. in CC are my co-author as well as the IETF working group chair for the JSContact standard.

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