How to tag a doctor's gender?

Hey everyone,

There’s a significant amount of people who have a preference concerning their doctors’ gender, especially in sensitive and intimate fields like psychiatry/psychotherapy or gynaecology/urology. I personally know quite a lot of people who only want to go see a male urologist or only go visit a female psychotherapist as a personal preference and who would benefit from such OSM data.

When mapping a psychotherapist recently, I didn’t find a tag on the wiki that could be used to tag the therapist’s gender.

I therefore have the following questions:

  • Is there an established tag I could use in this situation? If so, which one?
  • (How) do we tell apart the operator, compared to the owner, compared to the staff? Depending on the intention, not all of those would be very helpful to a user.
    • For example, if I want to get my intimate areas waxed and would prefer someone of my own gender to do that, I might not care about the operator’s or owner’s gender, but much rather the staff’s.
    • Conversely, I heard some people choose to prefer supporting local woman-owned businesses over others. For them, it’d actually be more important to know the gender of the owner rather than the staff or operator.
    • But if it’s a single-practitioner therapist’s office like the one I’m mapping, the ‘staff’ and ‘operator’ might be one and the same after all.

Hey,

I am pretty sure this falls under the category of personal information and therefore is not to be mapped - i wouldn’t be aware of such a tag either. I think the best way to provide access to this kind of information would be the respective website.

Even mapping the owner/operator of a single-practitioner would not provide the information as it would only provide the name.

There was also this discussion mentioned in the wiki: Mapping minority-owned and women-owned businesses

Greetings

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That’s fair enough, I understand the reasoning. I was considering that a doctor’s gender is hardly more private information than their name (which we already do tag), but you could actually indeed make the point that a doctor’s name is tagged as information on the POI itself, given that it’s on a sign outside and it’s part of the practice’s name in most cases. After all, we don’t tag the names of doctors inside a multi-doctor clinic either.

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