gender is actually highly sensitive for a lot of people as well, especially being forced into male/female buckets (which are actually sex and not gender).
There's a world of pain for them in this.
Just verified, they have an "Other" selection. This isn't forcing anyone into a bucket.
Oh yeah, publicly stating "other" is so much better =|
I suspect it's due to internationalization reasons. Even in English, we don't really have useful singular third-person gender-neutral pronouns (yes, I'm aware of "they", but it's actually a debated topic). In other languages where everything has genders, there might not be a reason to have gender neutral pronouns whatsoever.
So what? Gender isn't relevant to every online activity.
A century ago we didn't have any gender neutral clothing, either: if we need better pronouns, then let's make some up.
>if we need better pronouns, then let's make some up.
For every language?
Perhaps Google finds asking users for their gender (which is highly correlated with your name, anyway) to be an easier task than introducing the necessary pronouns into every language in the globe.
What about languages that don't have gender neutral pronouns?
Google isn't (yet) using it for selecting pronouns and/or they don't seem to have a problem using "their" as a neutral pronoun: http://i.imgur.com/1B5rT.png
They'll claim it's for customization of prompts ("His photos", "her updates"), but that's a cop-out. Think of the possibilities when you can sell such demographic details to your advertisers. Now it should start making sense.