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The zillions of forms sent out by the Office of Science and Technology as part of the process of collecting views on technology Foresight had, as you would expect, two boxes for declaring whether the respondent was male or female.

A tiny tick in one of the boxes, flourished without a care in the world, was all that was required. Angst, however, clearly has no bounds. A significant number of people sending in their replies, many of them academics, failed to declare their sex. Says one OST official: "It's quite worrying really. Maybe they don't know."