Airlines adopting Gender neutral recording

One of the challenges I have to stress to my Quant students is that you cannot calculate the "average" gender.  I mean if you code women 1 and men 2, and you want to know the mean, you get something like 1.4.

What does that mean?

The better way to describe a nominal variable is using mode or a frequency count.

So now that American, Delta and United will update their booking options to include a gender "non-binary" value, say click on Female, Male or undisclosed (or unspecified), we will still need to calculate it as a mode or frequency.

Finally, and kind of unrelated, I just did a survey online for the NYT, and I hate it when they force you to answer a question when you really want to say "none of the above."