It would be great to have some feedback on the use of gender in association links between individual constituents. If you're familiar with the way associations work now, you may know that there is fairly elaborate code there to try to figure out the gender of both sides of the association and map the association types appropriately.
Is this necessary, really? Wouldn't Parent/Child or Sibling/Sibling work as well as Mother/Daughter, Father/Daughter, Mother/Son, Mother/Daughter and Sister/Brother, Sister/Sister, Brother/Sister, Brother/Brother? Yes it gets a little tricky when you get into Uncles and Aunts, but maybe you just call that something like AuntUncle/NieceNephew. Interestingly Facebook has worked hard to keep all their relationship modeling gender neutral.
Thoughts are always welcome!
When we moved to Tessitura in '08 we converted old "relationship" records from a system that didn't track gender at all, so at the time we created several Parent/Sibling-type, gender-neutral xref types expressly for conversion. Like other posters, I don't believe we've gone on to use the association genders much now that they are available, either.
100% support the gender neutral Associations. Nick - I understand your concept, but we used Ms./Miss/Mrs. as the way to promote a estate planning seminar for women, so that can still be achieved.