Hi Leanne, welcome to the boards.
I think you need to ask yourself why you are asking for gender information at the application stage. Your role may require you to only consider people of a specific sex but if this is not the case then it is irrelevant information and you shouldn't include it on your application form.

At on-boarding it can be more complex but again - do you need to record this? Do you report on it? If you only need the information for HMRC purposes then that is how you frame the question to your employees. If you need to record it for other purposes then you will need to widen your options for the comfort of your employees.

As to whether it is discriminatory - I would say 'potentially'.

In reply to Deborah:

I'd have to disagree with Deborah and maintain that it's absolutely legitimate and usually necessary to ask for gender (and other equal opportunities monitoring) information at application stage simply for essential aggregate EO monitoring purposes.

Male / Female / Other / Prefer Not To Say might be the options?

Applications - I don't bother, we don't particularly care what their sex or gender is at that stage (or any stage really, hence me not collecting that data except for payroll!!). As David says if we reported on these stats I'd probably go for "Male/Female/other/prefer not to say"

Onboarding - As you say these are the only options for HMRC purposes and can't see that ever changing to be honest as I'm sure it's connected to national insurance without googling it. On my new starter form I have just put "...Male/Female*" with a note at the bottom "*please note that these are the only options currently provided by HMRC for payroll reporting purposes".

(Edited to add - actually just checked our new starter form and I've put Female first. Must have done that little rebellion subconsciously lol)

In reply to Samantha:

Systematically monitoring the gender distribution of applicants (a) can raise questions as to why any disparities with general population gender distribution are occurring and what might be done to improve any diversity disparities (b) provide a baseline for tracking the various stages in the selection process - so eg if 40% of applicants are female but only say 15% of those finally selected are female that may be indicative of some significant selection bias going on. But if only say 20% of applicants had been female to start with, maybe not - but why do so few females apply in the first place?

Of course the gender split is normally fairly self-evident from applicant names but other things such as ethnicity or disability aren't necessarily and so IMO need to be monitored for similar reasons at the applicant stage. Furthermore, if you ask precise questions about gender at applicant stage and don't just assume, obviously you can collect more accurate / diverse results for this category.

This raises the hackles of many folk.

As far as I'm aware there are only two legal & medical definitions of gender. Male and Female. I don't care what people want to call themselves LGBTG or whatever, but a recent case involving a female who was sacked for claiming there were only two sexes was found to have been unfairly dismissed although I can't recall the exact circumstances.

As a couple of other replies have indicated I'm not sure its necessary to indicate the sexual preferred gender of an applicant on their application form as many organisations have a separate form for 'equal opportunity monitoring which doesn't record names.

We have an Equal Ops form at the recruitment stage where we ask people to indicate their gender (Male/Female/Non Binary/Other). We then have a New Starter form which has the HMRC Gender options (with an explanation as to why there are only two choices). This seems to cover the various situations. The only place the HMRC gender is recorded is on the payroll system, which isn't seen by employees - our HR system allows for the wider gender options, which is what staff can see.

As is often the case, the terms sex and gender are being wrongly conflated.