I know there have been many discussions about this in the past few years (links below).
Are there plans to rename the "Gender" field to "Sex" and limit the categories to just "Male" and "Female" to align with the new NCES/IPEDS terminology per the Trump Administration's executive order of January 20, 2025?
If so, I expect a lot of schools will create a "Gender Identity" custom field.
Student Profile Gender Options (Today)
Clay McFerrin - Our policy is to comply with NCES. Our built-in gender collection categories remain the same: Male and Female.
Though it's clear that IPEDS reports starting in 2025 should use the term Sex instead of Gender, I can't find a source from NCES mandating the use of the term Sex on, for example, an application. There are pretty extensive FAQs on Race/Ethnicity collection, for example, but I can't find anything about this. Maybe they will clarify at some point. If it turns out that they require it to be collected a certain way Populi will comply with their guidelines. Reading the executive order it, looks to me like it just applies to the federal government (which would include NCES reporting). If it said something like, "college applications must use the word Sex instead of Gender and only present male and female as options" there might be some lawsuits.
The way the built-in Gender field works now seems to comply with federal regulations while also being flexible enough to comply with different state regulations.
The methodology of reporting on individuals for whom you don't have male/female data hasn't changed either. Any student recorded as "Gender Unknown" (Unknown in Populi) or "Another Gender" (Any "Additional Gender Option") would already automatically be allocated in reporting based on the proportion of known male/female students. The reporting section, added in 2022, where totals of students recorded as "Gender Unknown" or "Another Gender" is just being removed for 2025.
Anyway, hopefully I answered your question. This doesn't really seem like a feature request so if you have further questions just reach out to Populi Support.
