Why gender inclusion matters

Almost two years ago I left my permanent position at NHS Digital (now part of NHS England) to launch my own service design consultancy, Design for Joy. During my time at NHS Digital I worked as part of the team that designed and delivered the first release of the Covid-19 vaccination booking service. This was the biggest service I had ever worked on. Not only was I designing a critical service and contributing to a national crisis, but I was delivering a service that had the potential to be used by everybody in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. 

That’s a lot of people. When you’re designing at this scale you need to be sure you really are designing for everyone. While there are many facets to inclusive design and accessibility, the area of inclusion I was particularly interested in was sex and gender. 

This first came to my attention when, a matter of weeks before we were due to launch the service, we were informed that the service would need to ask people to input their gender to gain access. We did not need the data, it was a technical requirement. We were also heavily constrained around how we designed the question due to how the data was structured and how the backend systems operated. 

I wrote about my experience of navigating this problem and designing an inclusive service. I’ve also since delivered a talk on the same subject over 20 times. It’s a story that has clearly connected with people.