General
Will all customers receive this feature?
Yes. Enhanced Employee Gender is being rolled out to all customers with Dayforce Release 2025.1.0. Enhanced Employee Gender is a non-optional feature for the following reasons:
- Dayforce must begin to fully support non-binary gender options for compliance purposes.
- To maintain performance across the system, it was necessary to have only one data model for gender.
- To help ensure product quality, maintaining two separate sets of code (legacy and enhanced) could have been a serious risk.
My customer wants to use Enhanced Employee Gender. Can they just go ahead and use it?
This depends on the type of customer that you have and their specific Dayforce implementation. If they’ve been a Dayforce customer for a long time, it’s likely they’ll have many custom elements such as forms, reports, and exports that need to be audited and updated. More recent customers might have mostly system elements, and therefore can start to use this functionality immediately. See Introduction to Enhanced Employee Gender.
My customer has issues that aren’t covered in this playbook. What do I do?
Contact Dayforce Support.
Terminology and Language
What is Gender in Dayforce?
Gender is now the name for the entire record that holds both the legal and non-legal sex for an employee. This record encompasses where the employee lives, works, or wants to be reported from.
What is Assigned Sex?
Assigned Sex is the designation generally used in the legal or medical context, particularly where data relating to biological factors is required. In Dayforce, this information will be used when reporting an employee's legal sex. Assigned sex replaces the original term of gender.
What is Gender Identity?
Gender Identity is an individual’s personal identification of gender, which might or might not correlate with assigned sex. It isn’t reported to external state or government authorities or used by Dayforce for external reporting, unless explicitly stated.
What is Sex at Birth?
Assigned sex and sex at birth are different concepts. Assigned sex is the sex that the employee is today, as opposed to their sex when they were born. If the customer wants to record an employee’s sex at birth in addition to their assigned sex, they can enable the Display Enhanced Gender Last Modification Information and Effective Dating client property. This is system wide, for all employees in all countries. It can’t be limited to just one employee. Also, this client property can’t be disabled after it’s been enabled due to potential data integrity issues.
These terms are not suitable for my customer’s organization, what can be offered?
Currently, the above terms are fixed. We might consider the ability for customers to change these terms to suit their organization or employees in a future release of Dayforce but this isn’t guaranteed.
Other Types of 'Person' in Dayforce
Do the changes to Dayforce affect dependants and beneficiaries, emergency contacts, or other non-employee people?
No. This feature is available only to employees. It won’t be offered to dependants and beneficiaries or emergency contacts for the foreseeable future due to potential legal and data collection concerns.
Federal Records and Federal Event
Why do employees in the United States and Canada now have more than one record?
Although Dayforcenow captures gender information at a state and province level for the US and Canada, it’s also necessary to capture a federal country-level record in both countries. This federal information is used for potential downstream systems and other areas of Dayforce to help ensure that a singular point of reference can be used when several state or province records are present for an employee.
For some employees, Dayforce automatically creates records in the United States and Canada. Why?
This additional record is known the federal record, and it’s created by the federal event process. The federal event process creates US or Canada country-based records for employees because it’s often needed for downstream areas of Dayforce (such as Payroll and Benefits) and for external systems. If an employee has a singular M or F, or multiple matching M or F state or province records, Dayforce automatically creates the federal record for them.
For other employees, why is Dayforce asking them to confirm this secondary federal record?
The federal event creates country-based records for employees in case this information is ever needed for downstream areas of Dayforce (such as Payroll and Benefits) and external systems.
For example, for the following records, Dayforce will request confirmation of the employee’s federal gender information:
- The employee has a mixture of male and female state or province records.
- The employee has one or more non-binary state or province records.
- The employee has one or more blank (NULL) state or province records.
Why can’t we allow non-binary employees to report as such in the US and Canada?
Some customers might wonder why Dayforce can’t report “X” to the United States government, since it’s accepted in some capacity. Unfortunately, until all US government departments, compliance authorities, benefit carrier feeds, tax authorities, and other areas accept “X,” Dayforce can’t provide this option at the country level. When this becomes a standard, it can be supported. Other customers might ask why we don’t allow for the United States or Canada to have custom options at the country level. This is because those countries are controlled strictly by the compliance framework and we need to make sure that any values are applicable.
The Canadian government doesn't require reporting of gender at a federal level, why does Dayforce still need this record?
This is due to potential downstream third-party transmissions that might respect only male and female.
Can the Federal Event be disabled?
Not at this time.
Data Migration and the Gender Module
What is the migration?
Enhanced Employee Gender performs a one-time data migration of employee gender information and legacy gender identity configuration into new tables in the Dayforce database. This migration occurs during the update to Dayforce Release 2025.1.0 and is mandatory. See Gender Data Migration Overview.
Will Migrating Break Features and Functionality?
No. Care has been taken to help ensure that existing customer data and configuration continues to work as is.
How does a customer see the changes made to Dayforce in the migration?
A migration log has been created for customers so that they can view any issues that have occurred during the migration process. For most customers, we foresee little to zero impact. Some customers with non-standard (i.e., database manipulated) configuration might see some issues, but these can be resolved using the log. See Enhanced Employee Gender Migration Log.
Enhanced Employee Gender Supported Modules
What areas of Dayforce support Enhanced Employee Gender?
Enhanced Employee Gender is supported across all areas Dayforce that support the collection or reporting of gender data. See Enhanced Employee Gender Features and Updates.
Is Enhanced Employee Gender supported on Mobile?
No. It isn’t possible to update gender information on the mobile app at this time.