US/California-based company asked us to fill out a mandatory survey confirming our name for their records. Cool, they need that to pay us.
Then they asked for optional demographic information that we could choose to not answer. This demographic info included: sex assigned at birth, gender, pronouns, race, military/veteran status, disabled status.
Choosing at least one of the options was required for every question. All the questions had a “prefer not to answer” except “sex assigned at birth.” Assigned at birth only included male and female options.
I emailed HR to ask about it.
HR said:
We need “Sex assigned at birth” for insurance purposes and reporting purposes as required by law.
I responded asking what insurance purposes required this, and what laws required this. HR person responded by saying that I could skip this “mandatory” survey.
I hate it when companies lie to us about “mandatory” information, and I hate that they were asking every trans person at this large company to out themselves. If it was mandatory, then people couldn't skip the whole survey. Every person at the company thinks that filling in assigned at birth is mandatory if they didn't question it, yet the company couches it as saying the info is “voluntary” so that if you do give up the info, you have no legal recourse.