What we Collect

We ask for gender information in a very coarse manner:

• woman
• man
• non-binary
• decline to answer
• self-describe

Why we collect it

This information is useful to us in order to report to our funding agency the coarse statistics of our events.

We are proud of our gender balance in our events and seek to make minoritized voices represented everywhere in bioinformatics.

Why these categories

We understand that gender expression is a very complex topic¹ and want everyone to feel welcome at our events, and see themselves reflected in the statistics.

We have chosen these specific categories based to balance the useful information, with respect for attendees’ privacy, following discussions of best practices with numerous LGBT groups and individuals as to how they would best like to be represented in such surveys. I.e. we do not ask if an attendee is trans or cis, as that adds an unnecessary level of privacy invasion that is really only necessary in medical contexts, absolutely not in education contexts. Given our discussion with numerous trans individuals, even given the option of registering themselves as trans femme or trans masc, most would still just choose woman or man respectively as the question is indeed “gender identity” and not “medical history”.

What this data will not be used for

• Name badges
• Pronouns
• Advertising
• Identifying you in connection with your registration details

We keep this data very private and as the registration runs we separate out this data into a secondary sheet that is completely unlinked to the original in order to preserve privacy as best we can on a platform like Google Forms.