Events/Logistics/Exit survey

Incomplete draft. To be linked from Events/Affiliated, Events/Logistics/Wrap up and other places mentioning exit surveys.

How to have a good exit survey

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Gender

You might want to ask this to see if you are actually increasing diversity. But M/F as a binary choice is not inclusive. M/F/Other? We've been convinced that gender should be a single free form text field.

• Lukas Blakk explaining gender as a text field on the OH events list
• Sarah Mei writes Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora
• XKCD blog post on gender in forms has some poignant comments -- "I’ve spend the last three months flinching every time I fill out a form, no matter how stupid the form, because I can’t mark M or F. (Sometimes it makes me cry.)"

On the exit survey for Open Source Comes to UMD we put gender as a text field. But still not perfect -- it's the third question, and there aren't only three questions. Gender should be the last question so as to avoid stereotype threat.

Summing up:

• If you need to collect data on gender diversity, make gender a free form text field
• Also make the gender question the last question so that it doesn't prime other questions