Friends:
We probably are not that terribly far away from each other:
- Gender is social, sex is biological at birth. Clark is right in that the current table name in the PERSON table is wrong. Roger is right that this wasn’t always so tightly defined. Certainly not when the OMOP CDM was initiated. Back then, you would use the terms synonymously, and you would avoid the word “sex” because of its connotation.
- From a use case perspective, everything is fine as it is: If you ignore the wrong name, what’s in the PERSON table (gender_concept_id) is the biological sex, and the real gender is in OBSERVATION. We can run any study we want including these two.
The solution is to rename gender_concept_id to sex_concept_id. Very simple. Problem is that this is a gigantic, breaking, non-backwards compatible change. I would say every single method, study package or software tool would have to be changed. So, that is definitely a major release. We could smoothen it by having both fields for a transition period. But that is also ugly.
So, the question is when do we want to do that? Roger says “when the cow comes home”, Cark says “asap, it is already embarrassing”.