Hello,
I'd like to bring up an issue and an idea for a change to the gender field option that I believe will help other Absorb customers. There currently is not an option to allow admins to select a gender other than Male or Female. I've linked a similar submission at the bottom of this post.
The current "workaround" is to use a custom field for gender.
There are two issues associated with this workaround:
1) There are now two gender fields on the edit user page. Both fields are located in different sections on the profile page. There is not the ability to place them close together. There is not the ability to hide the Absorb built-in gender field. There is not an ability to communicate that there is a second gender field toward the bottom of the edit user page.
2) This workaround burns up one of the limited supply of custom fields we can add to our portal for a feature that should be updated in the base LMS.
The current options are Male, Female, or Not Selected. I believe we need to update this to allow at the very least an "Other" option, "Non-binary" option, "Prefer not to say" option, or just a free text field to allow the administrator to type in a string for the gender.
Although the Absorb built-in gender field does not seem to be connected to any reports or displayed on the learner experience user profile this is an important issue to us because administrators who interact with the dropdown can see that the only options are Male or Female which is not inclusive to non-binary administrators and learners. As a training provider our learning content reflects one of our company values: inclusion. It would be great if the Absorb system that our administrators utilize every day also reflect this.
Is there a reason the Absorb built-in gender field cannot be either 1) disabled/made hidden, or, 2) modified to accommodate non-binary genders?
There are some great articles on the web about creating web forms that acknowledge gender diversity and inclusion. Major companies already implement these practices.
Other idea illustrating the Custom Field workaround:
https://ideas.absorblms.com/ideas/LMS-I-495