Spotify & Salesforce Moving To Acknowledge More Than 2 Gender Options.

I got the bathroom key at work!  Yes!  I get to use the male staff bathroom and I'm so happy. 

Advertisement

What if I was not desiring to identify as a male or female?  What would I use this key for?  Which door would I use? And why the hell do we think about peeing so much in the United States?

There are business that are making waves in the inclusion pool and we should make note. They may be the pioneers of practices we will take aas common practice (hopefully) soon.  When filling out just about every form imagineable, you must be binary in your selection of gender / sex.  Male or Female are the options.  Online forms won't let you proceed unless you make a decision in that category.  Some forms include a "wish to not respond" option, but what if you want to respond, but you don't fit into the two options?

Spotify has added a "non-binary" option on its user registration form.  No, it's not on all the nations' forms, but it is a starting point.

Advertisement

Countries that have three options include the UK, Australia, and the US, and countries that still have only the standard M/F include Canada, Brazil, Turkey, Germany, France, and the Philippines. If you’re in a different country that we’ve not mentioned, please click through to their sign-up form here and tell us in an ask which country you’re in and how many gender options they offer! We’ll edit this post to give as complete a list as possible.

This follows a support request over 3 years ago for adding more gender options, which received over 300 votes. We found that request and blogged about it, appealing to followers to add their votes and comments, and the request was reviewed by Spotify soon after. In the mean time Spotify were willing to remove the gender information from users’ accounts manually.

If you’re in a country that doesn’t have three gender options available, you can contact Spotify here or on Twitter, @SpotifyCares, to express your support for the move being expanded to more countries. There are Twitter accounts for individual countries too, for which Google or @SpotifyCares can point you in the right direction. mxactivist.tumblr.com

 

What caused Spoitfy to take such a leap?  What caused them to think this was needed?  It pays to fill out those satisfaction surveys.  Actually it was a comment sent in to Spotify in 2013, they didn't ignore it, and made the change.

Advertisement

 

There's more than just signing up for an account or filling in a simple banal form.  There's also work interaction.  Salesforce recently established a pronoun recognition practice. 

Advertisement

 

 

It began with a button, a small blue-green pin, no more than 2 inches in diameter, affixed to the front of Ryan Walters’s name tag.

“My pronouns are they/them,” read the button in shining light blue letters. It was the first time Walters had said so in front of co-workers.

Walters, who identifies as genderqueer and prefers to be called “they” rather than “he” or “she,” was one of countless people at the conference who wore pronoun badges this week — a first for Dreamforce and an unusual step on the tech-conference circuit that left many scratching their heads, wondering why the buttons were needed in the first place.

The buttons weren’t the only thing Salesforce did this year to welcome conference goers who are transgender and those who don’t neatly identify as male or female — known as nonbinary, or genderqueer. On the second floor of Moscone West was an all-gender bathroom that was met with confusion, disgust and delight.

For those who know Salesforce and the politics of CEO Marc Benioff, a San Francisco native who has been a vocal advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, it wasn’t surprising. – sfchronicle.com

Advertisement

 

Giving options to people should not be a hard thing to do.  Do you think these simple practices will become common practice soon? It of course will depend on the up-to-date or forward thinking of your company.  If you're a business owner, what's stopping you from making changes like the ones mentioned above?

 

1 thought on “Spotify & Salesforce Moving To Acknowledge More Than 2 Gender Options.”

Leave a Comment