ISO/IEC 5218:2022

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

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

This document 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.