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.
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%!)
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?
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:
if you have a link in your profile to view your Women’s ranking statistics then a viewer can assume you identify as female
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.
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?
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.
