Other good e-mails to receive

[kaberett]

Sent to Local Secrets just as holiday season was kicking off:

Sender: kaberett
Message: I tried to sign up today - I've been meaning to for quite a while! - and was very disappointed to find that I can't, purely because "Title" is an obligatory field. (1) You offer only Mr, Mrs and Miss. (2) You offer no gender-neutral titles (e.g. Msc/Mx - both in common use by the NHS, the Co-op, and the Identity & Passport Services) (3) You do not offer the option of "no title" (relevant to e.g. Quakers) It would be fantastic if you could introduce a wider range of options. Thanks so much! -Alex (Msc [Surname])

Rec'd today:

Hi Alex

Thanks for alerting us to this issue. We have talked about it and decided to remove the 'title' field entirely and instead put a drop down where the visitor will select from

Male
Female
Rather not say

This information may be used for our marketing to help us target information. I hope this is a satisfactory solution.

Neal

Not perfect, but definitely an improvement :-)

Comments

[amethystfirefly]

That's a definite step forward. ^^

[lnr]

Heh, I suspect Local Secrets is one of the places on the internet where I am Mr Eleanor Blair (though I've not used it in years). I always figure if all the options are wrong I may as well go with the most obviously wrong one. Well done you for actually not only trying but *succeeding* in doing something about it!

[rmc28]

Good letter & I'm glad they listened, but I am fairly irritated at the idea my genitals are the prime determinant of which places I wish to patronise around Cambridge.

[kaberett]

Yeah, ditto. They did at least introduce "rather not say", I suppose? -- but I felt like there was very little further I could achieve by keeping arguing at this point. :-s

[sorrillia]

That pisses me off, too, but I suspect that advertising companies are actually the ones to blame: from the prevalence of this, I'm guessing that the middle-person companies that arrange for ads in things like to insist on it. (Probably because it's the demographic datapoint they can most often get away with demanding of people.)

[sorrillia]

Congrats.

Also, I'm impressed that the government there actually uses Msc/Mx! (I think you may have mentioned this before, but I failed to register it.) Although I'm surprised that they didn't give Ms as an option; I feel like that's become fairly standard here. (And I think that mandatory titles may also be somewhat less common: most websites I've interacted with offer a title but let me leave it blank.)

[jack]

Oh, yay! Yes, definitely not perfect, but I'm impressed that they were able to respond to a problem AT ALL, let alone with a fairly quick change that fixed the worst of it.