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!
We feel that it is useful to know the gender because this information is not always obvious from the constituent name…..for example, “Pat.” There is definitely an issue with names that are gender neutral or traditionally associated with the opposite gender. There needs to be a way to quickly know what the gender is in these cases. (It would be horrible if a development officer printed out the association information on a prospect and asked about their son only to find out it was a daughter.) Also, if you create an association that is not linked to another record, you have no systematic way of knowing the gender of the second person. This is especially important to our researcher.
Having said that, we are for the gender neutral approach to association types (parent/child), but prefer that there is still a way to indicate gender; for instance, a male/female check box.
Amber Albert
Orange County Performing Arts Center
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Generally here we feel that Gender is important. The non-gender specific name coupled with a missing title, or even non-gender specific title (Professor/Doctor), can cause embarrassment. But this detail is not necessary in the relationship or association section. Tick box is good, after all there are only two alternatives.
Debbie