Thursday, January 8, 2009

Forms that ask for the sex of your son

Some forms can be irritating in the way data are asked. Take the case of the Maxicare account application form.  Maxicare is the HMO engaged by our office for the medical insurance of our dependents.

Every beginning of year we are required to fill up an application form.  A single employee can enroll as dependents her or his parents or single and unemployed siblings. For married employees like me, one can enroll one's spouse and single, unemployed children below 25 years old.

The form has this column for names of dependents, another column for relationship with the dependent. So I put in the names of my wife and my son and declare their relationship with me in another column. 

But sometimes I  cannot understand why there is still a column for age when there is already a column for birthday. Perhaps an encoder of the data wants it easy. Or the database program is very primitive it cannot compute the age from the birthdate. Even an Excel data file can easily do that.

Now why on earth should the form still has a column for the sex and civil status of my dependents?  Unless same sex marriage is already practised in the Philippines I could not be married to a male spouse because I already signified my sex as male in the appropriate box. And my son could not be female even if he were gay or transgender.