i.justrealized

Turns out that there is an ISO standard for sex. Man is 1 and woman is 2. But why man precedes woman? The standard explicitly states that no significance is to be placed on the fact that male is encoded as 1 and female as 2. The encoding merely reflects existing practice in the countries that initiated this standard.

More information at ISO.

International standard ISO 5218 defines a representation of human sexes through a language-neutral single-digit code. It can be used in information systems such as database applications. (Source: Wikipedia)

The four codes specified in ISO 5218 are:

• 0 = not known,
• 1 = male,
• 2 = female,
• 9 = not applicable.

Possibly related:

1. PDF is now an ISO standard
2. How to prepend zeroes in front of numbers
3. For every girl… There is a boy…
4. Black American kids are cheaper

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 9:44 pm and has been tagged did you know, gender, iso, man, sex, standard, trivia, woman. Comments RSS feed.