My Job of Many Colors

Applying for a job at a major media research company, I came across the following (optional) drop-down-menu question (if I knew HTML I could probably actually program the thing right in here. Maybe I'll get a book from the library today, but probably not):

Ethnicity:
-Hispanic (Spanish-Speaking)
-Not Hispanic (Spanish-Speaking)

I mean they had a separate category for "Race," but still pretty funny that a company openly parses job applicants along the Hispanic-Not divide.

This brings me to a larger point mostly about the Facebook, but about other Web sites too. For a while, the "Political Views" category on the FB's profile information yielded a drop-down menu with, I think, five categories: Very Liberal, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Very Conservative. People responded (at least I picture it this way) largely by gleefully placing themselves in one of these categories ("Conservative"), thinking about it for a second then deciding that it wasn't that big a deal even if the labels weren't perfect ("Liberal," "Very Liberal"), or out-and-out flouting Zuckerberg's categories and refusing to answer the question (the soon-to-be-added "Others").

Right, right. We took Anthropology and Sociology in undergrad so we all got that factoid about the Census and college applications forcing people to identify themselves using problematic categorizations. But it appears that we could easily allow people to type in their own categorizations, then dump the entries in a database, control for misspellings or variations on the same concept, and get a more adequate distribution of data. If we felt like imposing problematic categories on the data ex-post, we certainly wouldn't have a problem doing so; we'd just have to, for example, include "biracial" self-identifiers in the larger "minority" category. At least the underlying data would be more specific.

In my mind I'm picturing infinitely divided pie-charts. Each slice is a slightly different shade of the color next to it. Look at it one way, it's a color wheel; just some red, some yellow, whatever. Look closer, and there's a bajillion variations. With computers, we should be able to make job-applicant pools act in a similar way. There seems precious little reason for the multiple-choice cop-out now that we have Google or even, God help us, Concordance.