![]() Recent years have seen an increasing awareness of gender diversity in the West. In countries like India, Pakistan, and Nepal, these nonbinary cultural understandings of gender are also institutionalized in government policies and practices (Busby, 2017). Two-spirit individuals of the Indigenous North American peoples (e.g., Wilson, 1996), Hijras of India (e.g., Nanda, 2015), and bissu of the Bugis in Indonesia (e.g., Graham, 2004) are just a few of the gender identities that exist outside of the woman–man dichotomy. Yet many cultures around the world include more than two genders. Many people raised in Western cultures assume that gender is a binary social identity consisting of two discrete categories: women and men. Specifically, we urge researchers to abandon the use of binary gender measurers. Although we applaud these common practices, we argue that more needs to be done to move our science in the direction of gender inclusivity. GENDER FLUX MANUALToday, the American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association, 2010a) style manual recommends that all researchers adopt such practices. ![]() Within just a few years of these calls to action, most researchers were measuring and reporting gender as part of their basic sample demographics (Gannon, Luchetta, Rhodes, Pardie, & Segrist, 1992). As part of a broader shift towards more inclusive research practices, activist–scientists urged psychologists to measure and declare their sample demographics, including gender, to increase accountability among researchers and allow for more accurate judgements concerning the generalizability of results (e.g., Denmark, Russo, Frieze, & Sechzer, 1988 see also Kitiyama, 2017). The field began to listen to researchers who questioned the ethics, validity, and generalizability of a science based on the experiences of such a small and unrepresentative group of people (e.g., Yoder & Kahn, 1993). These practices began to change in the 1980s. Because samples were homogenous with respect to gender and other demographic factors and because pervasive cultural biases led people to assume that “White, young, privileged man” was the default category of person (e.g., Bem, 1993 Hegarty & Buechel, 2006), many researchers during this era overlooked the need to measure and describe their sample demographics. ![]() During the early decades of Western psychological science, most researchers used convenience samples comprised entirely of wealthy, White, and otherwise socially advantaged young men (Grady, 1981 McHugh, Koeske, & Frieze, 1986). Historically, the problem with demographic gender measurement in psychology was that it was absent (Gannon, Luchetta, Rhodes, Pardie, & Segrist, 1992). 2 THE PROBLEM WITH BINARY GENDER MEASUREMENT We also recommend simple changes that most researchers can easily implement to alleviate the primary problems of measuring gender/sex as a binary construct. In this paper, we elaborate these concerns and present the results of our research documenting psychologists' current practices for measuring gender/sex 1 as a demographic variable. Rather, this binary approach to gender measurement misrepresents psychologists' current understanding of the nature of gender diversity, leads to the misclassification of research participants, and violates our ethical standards as scientists. However, social and cultural understandings of gender and sex are changing, and with that change comes the increasing awareness that this demographic question is anything but inconsequential. This ubiquitous question, above, seems both automatic and inconsequential to the majority of researchers collecting demographic data to describe their sample. We also address common concerns expressed by researchers, including whether measuring “sex” resolves the issue and whether gender-inclusive measures confuse or offend participants. We extend five simple, no-cost recommendations that begin to resolve these ethical and methodological problems: use and report, nonbinary gender measures report the prevalence of nonbinary participants clarify their inclusion and treatment in analysis and use gender inclusive language. Psychologists' reliance on binary measures also conveys an exclusionary attitude that is contrary to recent ethical recommendations and contrary to the growing public concern about transgender rights. It fails to represent psychologists' current understanding of gender, violates our ethical principles as scientists, and can result in gender misclassification. Yet our review of recently published empirical articles reveals that demographic gender measurement in psychology still assumes that gender comprises just two categories: women and men. ![]() ![]() Empirical evidence affirms that gender is a nonbinary spectrum. ![]()
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