sexe: 2

22:11 Jan 28, 2010 

FYI: It was precisely because I thought that conceivably "politically correct" awareness of de Beauvoir's book and a desire to correct the situation she describes might have led to a transposition of the traditional order of m/f for gender listings that led me to make my posting in the first place.

22:10 Jan 28, 2010 

which did the Almighty create first? (OK, he perfected a few things with his second attempt, but He really should have kept on trying ...).

21:55 Jan 28, 2010 

Simone de Beauvoir's book "The Second Sex" refers to women.

16:11 Jan 28, 2010 

Actually for "prénom] the entry is "aucun". (I but "name given] above to simpy the explanation. Une "nom patronymique" there is an African name. My unfamiliarity with the language in question prevents me saying what gender it would correspond to.

15:45 Jan 28, 2010 

Like Bourth and Polyglot, I'd say that 2 = woman. Can't you decide with the prénom given?

15:35 Jan 28, 2010 

I guess I didn't make myself clear about the text: the reference appears as the last entry in a stand-alone block with type of information given to the left,followed in each case by a colon, and to the right, following the colon, the kind of information requested in each case. The full text is (replacing the actual entries except for the last our of respect for privacy, as follows:
Numéro d'étudiant: [number given]
Identifiant national: [number given]
Nom patronymique: [name given]
Nom d'usage: [blank]
Prénom: [name given]
Sexe: 2
(Note, though not reproducible here, each of the above colon-separated pairs is on a separate line.)
Below this, follwoing white space, comes the student's address.
In light of the above I feel certain that the "2" is NOT a page number, computer code (the other entries are not codes but include names), etc., but the entry that corresponds to "sexe" in the came way that the other entries corrended to ID number, name, etc. My hope was that someone familar with French university or other bureaucratic usage would tell me whether "2" stands for "M" or "F", since to me at least it clearly stands for one or the other. Amyway, thanks to all answerers.

08:20 Jan 28, 2010 

all male Social Security numbers in France begin with "1" to indicate "male" and all women's numbers start with "2". OK, it may be sexist but the system has been developed on this basis and it would be virtually impossible to change now

07:04 Jan 28, 2010 

My Social Security number starts with a certain digit that is, in principle in any case, shared by all holders of Social Security sharing the same sexual appendages - or not - as me. Others have the one digit that comes before or after.