Sexing the Database, page 4
At this point in history, gender as an identity tracking tool in databases is failing to serve its purpose. While different organizations are handling this problem in different ways, most acknowledge that the simple M and F have to be supplemented with more details -- and indeed, detailed information about a given individual is far more valuable. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, ID Card Office Manager Dan Michaud says the MIT ID database contains no information about gender whatsoever. Students' identities are tracked by only their photos. And MIT isn't alone in taking its databases where none have gone before. According to insiders at Schwab, a large financial services firm, client databases also contain no references to gender. Instead, Schwab keeps records of a client's preferred form of salutation, such as "Ms." or "Doctor" or "Honorable." Only a tiny minority of these salutations have to do with gender, and nearly all are relevant to the client's professional identity -- a databasing scheme that makes sense for a company that religiously keeps track of its clients' socioeconomic status.
The withering away of gender as a form of classification is only just beginning. In nearly every major database, we see residual forms of identification -- eye color, gender -- being phased out by new ones -- photographs, biometrics, DNA. We also see gender being pushed out of databases where more pertinent information will ultimately prevail. This is certainly the case in databases devoted to marketing and financial information. Hospitals, too, will need to come up with more ways of coding for gendered identities that do not fit standard diagnostic codes. MIT's Michaud says he did some consulting work for a non-profit health care delivery organization that "gave me 8 categories for gender that I coded into the database." Many databases offer gender as a text field that can be filled with whatever term the client prefers. And for some newly-minted database designers, gender has simply become a non-issue. As a graduate student in computer science at MIT put it to me, "I just designed a database for community organizing, and if somebody using it asked me to take gender out, I would. No big deal."
This state of affairs will be perplexing to anyone who has even a glancing acquaintance with contemporary pop culture. Media, politics and public life are so saturated by references to gender that attempting to negotiate the social landscape without them would be tantamount to blinding yourself. Messages about what it means to be male and female are woven into the fabric of advertisements (women use the shapely pink razors; men use the steely blue ones). They haunt the racks of toy stores where gun-related items (appropriate for boys) are segregated from doll-related items (appropriate for girls). But every day, there is a database designer or administrator who must decide -- consciously and deliberately -- what identification system to use when categorizing clients, patients, members, donors, or whatever. And increasingly, gender doesn't fit into that system.
This isn't to say that we're on our way to a feminist Utopian future, where hierarchy gives way to democracy and men stay home with the babies. We're simply entering into a new regime of classification, one in which new details about our bodies and identities are prioritized over others. In the future, police will identify you by your biometrics, not your gender. Corporations will squirt ads at you based on your annual income, rather than what you have between your legs. Is this liberation? Hardly.
And yet in the space between one set of classifications and another, one database schema and the next, there is a brief sense of freedom and possibility. Somewhere out there, in a gray-white industrial office, in the deepest reaches of the lowest basement, a database administrator is changing the future. A person has walked into his office with a request for an ID card -- it's probably the seven-hundredth request this week. But this time, something is different. When the database administrator asks the person for a gender, the person will reply: I have no gender; I am other. Who knows what they mean? Are they intersexed? A shaman? It doesn't matter, really. What matters is that they refuse to be put into a category that doesn't fit.
Actually, what really matters is that the database administrator hears them. And decides -- perhaps on a whim, perhaps out of political conviction -- that the database must change to fit the data. "OK, I'll make a new category in our database for other," the administrator tells the person. Finally, the person is in the data stream as something other than an M or an F. Their identity seems more solid, more real. It has the stamp of institutional recognition. Yes, there is a dark side to all this: one doesn't always want to be seen, to be tracked by some kind of shadowy, powerful information-gathering machine. But people do want to be recognized. We want to be seen for who and what we really are; we want to make our mark on the database. 
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