Preface:

Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).

Scope:

This International Standard specifies a uniform representation of human sexes for the interchange of information. It is intended to

• reduce the time required to record and/or format the representation of sexes and transmit the corresponding data;
• improve clarity and accuracy of interchange;
• minimize the amount of human intervention required for communicating the representation of sexes; and
• reduce costs.

This International Standard does not prescribe file sequences, storage media, programming languages, or other features of information processing to be used in its implementation.

This International Standard meets the requirements of most applications that need to code human sexes. It does not provide codes for sexes that may be required in specific medical and scientific applications or in applications that need to code sex information other than for human beings.

This International Standard does not supplant national standards for coding sexes that are designed based upon codes derived from names of sexes in the various languages (for example "M" for "male" and "F" for "female" in the English language). It provides a numeric code that is independent of language-derived codes and as such is intended to provide a common basis for the international exchange of information containing human sex data elements.