Gender

[Weebles66]

Is Fitbit ever going to join this century and have other genders as options when you join?

[JohnnyRow]

Just my guess on that:  This is not any kind of value judgement by Fitbit.  It appears you might be a new user.  As you explore more features you might see that several features depend on sex for rating or evaluation.  You can well question if this is valid, but currently the supporting research is only based on male and female,  the only alternative seems to be give up some features completely.

For instance, Fitbit determines a default stride length for you which is used to convert your step count to distance, which is quite close for most people.  One of the factors determining default stride length is sex.  If you allow 10 different choices for  sex, are you going to force everybody to measure their own stride length rather than having fitibit come up with a close default?

Another example is fitness score simulating VO2 max.  Your rating is partly based on sex. I.E. the same value would be rated a higher %ile for a female than for a male - not discriminatory - just the way it is.  If you could point to some sound research on the typical VO2 max for some 3rd sex category with a large enough number of participants, fitbit might consider that, but at present, I expect M and F is all that is available in the research so that is all the categories Fitbit  considers.

[LZeeW]

@Weebles66   Edited to what @JohnnyRow wrote.  BMR calories come from a known equation.  There is one equation for male and one for female.  Likewise, the stride length equation is based on your height.  One equation for male and one for female.

[steph.m]

i'd love to see more gender options too! male and female are not the only sexes, and they're not the only genders. research needs to be expanded to include all gender and sex identities too. estimated stats can never be accurate regardless of sex because everyone's body is completely different. there is no accurate "average" even within each sex. give me a combined average, i don't care.

[JohnnyRow]

The place for these is really Feature Suggestion board.