title: Ruby convention for representing gender or sex
body: <p>What is the ruby convention is for representing a person's gender or sex when working with it as a field in an object? There is a binary gender assumption (not that I agree with this, but data is generally gathered this way).</p>
  
  <p>Would you use different types for different situations? When we display this information to users, we want to display it in some meaningful way (<code>Male</code>, <code>male</code>, <code>M</code>, whatever, not <code>0</code> or <code>1</code>), and we might want to use it to sort objects by gender. My thought is to use symbols of <code>:Male</code> and <code>:Female</code> or the like, but I'd like to hear the thoughts of people with more experience in Ruby.</p>
  
  <p>While I found some suggestions (writing your own substitute enum code and creating a Gender class), I didn't find anything that compared or contrasted this approach to using booleans, symbols, strings, characters, or identified it as the common convention.</p>