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There are different aspects in which designing surveys is related to gender. It has become an issue of concern in questionnaire design when drafting questions about gender or gender identity. Whereas gender used to be a straightforward variable, that was not even asked but directly observed by face to face interviewers, now it is beginning to be explicitly asked and increasingly using formats that are different from the traditional binary man/woman responses. There is also an increasing interest in different ways to ask about gender identity.

Also related to questionnaire design, there is the issue of grammatical gender and how this is being dealt with in a social context demanding a more inclusive language. In many of the “grammatical gendered” languages, those which assign a gender to nouns and their modifiers, the masculine form is used to refer both to masculine and feminine objects/people. Increasing social contestation of the generic masculine is pushing towards asking questions in a different way, i.e. explicitly differentiating masculine and feminine grammatical forms. For instance, asking someone in Spanish about their evaluation of doctors as professionals is supposed to include both male and female doctors (at least from a linguistic standpoint). However, from a cognitive perspective, it is unclear whether respondents interpret the question having in mind male and female doctors, or just male doctors.

This leads to the third aspect addressed in this session: gender differences in answering survey questions. Some evidence suggests that men and women carry out the survey response process differently in questions dealing with diverse topics, from political knowledge (Rapoport, 1981; Ferrin et al, 2017) to the number of past sexual partners (Brown & Sinclair, 1999; Brown et al. 2017), and that the question design and survey features might explain some of those differences.

To sum up, this session invites papers that address the different ways in which gender may be affecting survey research design and results. Examples include:

1) Experiences from national or cross national surveys in the way to formulate questions about respondents´ gender/gender identity.
2) Experiences on how to deal with the design of questions in which grammatical gender might make a difference, in national and cross-national surveys, where the need of translation/combining different languages complicates the picture.
3) Experiments/analysis of survey results about gender differences in responding to survey questions.