I think you are even undervaluing participation even at 10-12%. The last two major tournaments I went to women represented aprox 25% of the field.
When the distinction was added and the Women’s rankings were added a year or two ago it appeared that the system was guessing based on first name, which actually seems worse than defaulting to male. Has this been changed?
I found this when I was looking to see if this topic was brought up before. It looks like that was just done to start the Woman’s rankings.
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At the risk of being disrespectful to someone: making a guess based on given name is probably somewhat better than defaulting to male. I’ve never met a male (or someone presenting as male) named “Mary”, “Jane”, or “Lisa”. I’ve also never been asked at any tournament at all if I present as male or female. I can also say that most people I’ve encountered who have assumed genders other than their birth gender also assume names typical of their desired gender. Given those facts, and the strong inertia around getting hundreds or thousands of TD’s to ask that question of all their participants and submit that data, it seems like making an educated guess based on given name isn’t such a bad thing. Affected players can certainly request a change in their status with IFPA if the default is not appropriate, but it’ll probably be correct for the majority. (Speaking just for myself, I would not be offended if someone assumed that a player named “Joe” or “Joseph” was a male, or that a player named “Josephine” or “Josephina” was a female… those are reasonable assumptions, even if not 100% correct.)
Yeah, but names get complicated pretty quick. If I ran a hundred person tournament, I might not remember if Leslie Nielsen was a man. Let’s pretend I’m averse to mistakes: assuming TDs get contact info for new players (is that a thing?) what human being is going to call up and immediately hang up when they hear Frank Drebin say Hello? No, the simplest solution is Leslie finally sorts this out himself when he decides to finally update his ifpa info and get his little picture up there.
Aw shit, Leslie Nielsen RIP.
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I never intended that TDs would guess someone’s gender. I figured it would not be bad to ask a player if they wanted their gender included in the results. After think about, that’s hella awkward. I’d just like to see gender be listed as unknown or neutral until someone claims their profile and decides to update their gender. Folks should opt in to giving more personal information.
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I brought this up with @pinwizj back in January and was told then that he thought that as part of the rebuild process, the system does look for new players submitted in Women-only events and then updates their profiles to be Female.
@Shep makes reference to using genderize.io in this post: Supressed player
So while it defaults to Male, there is some effort put in to identify Female players as well.
But as has been raised, really the best person to be identifying their gender is the player, which can be done by registering (albeit in a binary manner). I made up a sheet to be displayed at our monthly tournament to explain to players how to register:
Feel free to use it at your own events!
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Thanks guys, this would be a good change to make. Can you make a non-binary gender option while you’re in there? (If there isn’t already one, I don’t remember.)
I also think it’s reasonable to assume female for people who come in for the first time via a women’s event score. Even though I know some women’s events are open to non-binary people, they should be at least somewhat comfortable with representing themselves as femme if they entered, and they can always correct it later.
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So, my thoughts on this are; the women’s profile is a category of player, and if you don’t opt in, you aren’t assigned to male, you just aren’t opted in to women’s ranking profile. The default tournament submission or player category is “Open”, not male. Just like TDs don’t ask age, they don’t ask gender, and it’s up to the player to opt in to a category if available. And then there are ranking categories, such as Youth rankings, senior rankings, women’s rankings, etc. I think the trick is, how can we communicate how to opt in better, so more women who want to participate, can?
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Ed is actually spot on with how we’ve treated it in our system. For years gender wasn’t a choice on player profile updates.
The creation of the Women’s World Rankings along with the Women’s World Championship created a need for us to allow players to qualify for this category through updating their player profile with us.
We continue to not list gender in the player bio field on player’s profile pages, so the entire “gender” field has always been specifically designed for allowing women to declare themselves eligible for the Women’s rankings.
All of them are AFAIK. No one should be checking gender so whatever a player declares is acceptable. I suppose if that starts being abused it will be addressed.
See my post above for a document I’ve created as a start.
We should be promoting the importance of registering, not only for proper classification, but also to be eligible to compete in IFPA World Championship and the various IFPA Championship Series that are hosted. Some players might not care about the latter, though, so it’s also helpful to mention the other perks (e.g., Stern Rewards for Biggest Mover of the month, accurate stats, ability to put photo, etc.).
Then what do the Player Age and Gender stats represent? Are those only the players who have specified a gender? Would it be possible to include a “Not Specified” count as well to give a more accurate picture?
We cite that percentage breakdown for gender without really knowing what it captures.
(Sidebar: Excited to see that the female participation rate is nearing 13%!)
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One of our premiere level sponsors wanted a breakdown of the player base by age and also to find out what percentage of the player base was female.
Media outlets will also often ask me for this info in interviews.
This was the easiest way for me to be able to quickly reference those stats.
We could change the “Male” listing to “Not Female”, or we could also keep the stats page private for IFPA staff only if it ends up offending too many people.
I don’t think it’s a matter of offense, but rather one of transparency. I really just want to understand what that stat means, especially if it’s being cited by the media.
Is that a breakdown of all players or just those who have registered or just those who have registered & specified a gender or other?
Or are you telling me to stop asking questions or you’ll take the information away? 
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I believe it’s 13% of the “registered” profiles are women. New players are defaulted to nothing until they update their profile.
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Seems like the best idea here. What does it matter to anyone viewing my, or anyone else’s, profile, what gender I associate myself with?
We used to have a public link on the Resources tab and pulled it down. Now you must already know the URL to get to that page.
The only way of anyone having any insight to your gender would be to look at your IFPA profile page. There are two conclusions a viewer to your page can make:
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if you have a link in your profile to view your Women’s ranking statistics then a viewer can assume you identify as female
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if you don’t have a link to view your Women’s ranking stats then you aren’t identified as anything. You’re simply not identifying as a female.
In looking at your profile in particular the only conclusion I can make is that you don’t identify yourself as female. I don’t assume you identify as male or any other gender identity. That’s your business and is kept private from our site.
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Question: Are there rewards for the biggest female mover of the month? While I agree with you that we should promote the importance of registering, I have a lot of players in my women’s league who do not participate in co-ed leagues. Since they are associated with women’s events, they’re already identified as female. Is there an additional incentive for them to actually register and maintain their IFPA ID’s?
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If they become highly ranked enough to qualify for the IFPA Women’s World Championship, they’ll need to register to compete.
I don’t think the biggest mover in the Women’s rankings is recognized…
Then collect that data. The IFPA submission is about ‘who’ not much more than that. All the finer details come from players building out their own profiles.