gender formats
This page lists existing format(s) which represent gender in their schema.
specs
vCard
Listing vCard first as vCard4 has the most up to date, modern, and inclusive notion of "gender".
vCard4
vCard4 has a 'gender' property with:
- 'sex' enum
- M=male,
- F=female,
- O=other,
- N=none or not applicable,
- U=unknown
- and 'gender-identity' plain text
fields, thanks in great part to this research and the advocacy of the microformats community on the VCARDDAV IETF list.
As such, 'p-sex' and 'p-gender-identity' properties are defined in h-card for microformats2.
x-gender
Since vCard3 had no gender feature, some vCards seem to contain an X-GENDER property. This is in line with RFC 2426 which allows applications to define their own properties, prefixed with "X-". class="x-gender" has been implemented in Cognition.
Microsoft vCard
Circa 2000:
- vcard_name Property. Gender seems to be supported in Internet Explorer (appears related to AutoComplete functionality). They define
vCard.Genderas "Gender mapped to the vCard.Gender schema." (despite no such feature in the vCard standard of the time). Though it's not explicit on the page, this documentation is from the early 2000s, presumably documenting support in Windows Internet Explorer version 5+ or perhaps 6+.
FOAF
- FOAF: Gender — a plain string with two blessed values "male" and "female"
ISO IEC 5218
The ISO/IEC 5218 standard specifies a standard for the "SEX" field:
The four codes specified in ISO/IEC 5218 are:
- 0 = not known,
- 1 = male,
- 2 = female,
- 9 = not applicable.
OpenID sreg
- OpenID Simple Registration Extension 1.0 openid.sreg.gender:The End User's gender, "M" for male, "F" for female.
OpenSocial
First included in OpenSocial 0.7 as an ENUM, which is a string field that has some predefined values. current spec text in OpenSocial 1.1 is:
The gender of this person. Service Providers SHOULD return one of the following Canonical Values, if appropriate:male, female, or undisclosed, and MAY return a different value if it is not covered by one of these Canonical Values.
Portable Contacts
Same as OpenSocial, in the current 'C' spec:
The gender of this contact. Service Providers SHOULD return one of the following Canonical Values, if appropriate: male, female, or undisclosed, and MAY return a different value if it is not covered by one of these Canonical Values.