2023 archived consultation: Removing reference to a registrant's gender on the public register

Our proposal to remove information about a registrant’s gender from the public register followed the outcome of our consultation on a draft policy to support registrants who wish to update information about their gender on our register. Some respondents to this consultation, including the Professional Standards Authority (PSA), questioned why we provide information on gender on the register at all.

We undertook a full public consultation on our proposal to remove information about a registrant’s gender from the register, which was open for 12 weeks from 29 September to 22 December 2023. We asked respondents for their views on our proposal and its impact.

You said

We received 96 written consultation responses, mostly from individual registrants, as well as one optical representative organisation and two patient/charity organisations. The findings are summarised in our GOC response to the consultation (see the ‘files’ section below).

We did

We have decided to remove reference to a registrant’s gender from the public register. The main justifications are that the information is not necessary to deliver public protection, the information can be easily accessed from other sources and only a small minority of register users appear to access this information. We also wish to safeguard against outing trans registrants and inadvertently enabling discrimination against women by publishing this information.

We will continue to hold information internally on our CRM system about the gender of our registrants (and other protected characteristics) so that we can carry out equality and diversity data analysis and so that we can share appropriately anonymised information with commissioners and others. We will also continue to operate our policy for managing requests from registrants to change their gender recorded within our internal CRM system.

Our full response and an updated impact screening assessment can be accessed below.

Files:

• Full response to removing reference to a registrant's gender on the public register consultation (PDF Document)
• Impact screening assessment (PDF Document)

Published responses

View submitted responses (PDF Document) where consent has been given to publish the response.