Is normalizing the gender table going too far?

Question

I am not a database guy, but am trying to clean up another database. So my question is would normalizing the gender table be going too far?

User table:
userid in         


        

Answer 1

I'll remark on another aspect: sorting. Normally, 'M' sorts after 'F'; in a project one time, a database table had a gender field with either of those two values. There was a desire to be able to sort results on the gender (census data) and a further preference to have 'M' appear before 'F'. My solution was to add a separate lookup table, assigning the Male value an ID of 0, and Female an ID of 1. So queries on the main table could easily be sorted on the new genderID field.