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!
Although I agree that the association type would not need to be gender specific, I do believe there needs still to be a way to specify the gender of the associated individual. For us, that means being able to specify the gender of the children/cousins in a reportable method, as well. Using the structure of the current associations that would mean having a field at the association level to signify the gender. However, I realize there may be another place to hold the gender of children within a newly conceptualiized contituent module that could take care of the same need.
I agree that while it is important to be able to somehow identify the gender of an associated individual, the generic association types would work fine.