That is sadly not really the case. If you ask the majority of people the consensus is "male" and "female" are the only genders. If what you saying were the case we would not even get the "other" option, not to mention all the other neo-genders.
Counterpoint: plenty of software doesn't provide any third options, because representing the data a just a single bit is convenient and the idea that there possibly being more than two options never even crossed the developer's mind. When you do get more than two options it's because the developer heard that it might be a possibility and they wanted to account for it, even it's never used. I don't think you can gleam much information about the cultural context from what options are available in software forms.
> When you do get more than two options it's because the developer heard that it might be a possibility and they wanted to account for it, even it's never used. I don't think you can gleam much information about the cultural context from what options are available in software forms.
Not necessarily. There are programmer-ergonomics benefits to using a enums instead of booleans.
Personally, I'd never represent anything except a literal true/false value as a boolean. That has nothing to do with how I conceive of the possible values; it's mainly because I like to give things names that I can read.
Not at all - there's sufficient range in a 32 bit unsigned integer and any values used after the initial assigned values can have details in a lookup table modifiable as time passes.
In actual practice, the Australian Government found it sufficient to expand gender on passports from [M]ale [F]emale to simply include [O]ther (2011) [1].
I wasn't saying that these options don't exist. I was saying that not all dropdowns will include that information unless there is more consensus than there is currently.
