We are required to submit IPEDs reports and are very aware of the reporting structures and requirements with IPEDs and do utilize IPEDs recommendations (https://surveys.nces.ed.gov/ipeds/public/survey-materials/faq?faqid=11) on how to best report students whose Genders are not Male or Female. I’ve copy + pasted below from their FAQs.
I’d like to recommend allowing for institutions to elect to decide if they want to use Genders outside of Male and Female as this is becoming a very common practice with admissions (despite IPEDs failing to recognize the options). I only recommend this because our Admission Applications and Inquiry Forms will not be able to map Gender currently and it means we’d have to use the Custom Fields… which means our reports will have to be further customized to include the custom field.
My institution has students for which gender does not align with the ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ categories in IPEDS (e.g., non-binary, unknown). Since there is no place to report other gender categories on the IPEDS data collection screens, how should we report these individuals?
These individuals are still to be reported to IPEDS. It is up to the institution to decide how best to handle reporting individuals whose gender does not align with the ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ categories. However, a common method used is to allocate these students based on the known proportion of men to women.
