Add an "About me" textarea to user profile pages (and potentially remove the Gender field in favor of it)

I propose that an optional "About me" or "Biography" textarea be added to the Personal Information section of drupal.org user profiles, similar to what is already done on sites like groups.drupal.org and sf2010.drupal.org.

The reason for this proposed change is that the drupal.org profile pages currently ask for a couple random bits of personal data (gender and country, mostly). However, there are other categories of personal information (race/religion/sexual orientation/what you were doing five years ago before you discovered Drupal/etc) that people might consider important and that would be interesting to share. We clearly do not want to add separate fields for each of these things, so a textarea is the best way to allow people to say whatever they want about themselves. I think that allowing people to do this would improve interactions within the community and showcase the interesting backgrounds that people involved with the Drupal project actually have.

In addition, if we add this textarea, we can potentially remove the Gender field from profile pages. A possible reason for doing this is that in #752452: Expand options in the "Gender" profile field, there is an attempt to construct this field in a way that is more friendly to people who do not consider themselves to be either strictly "male" or "female"; however, the linked resources in that issue (see http://www.sarahdopp.com/blog/2010/designing-a-better-drop-down-menu-for... and especially http://www.opendoors.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/creating-inclusiv...) generally suggest that one of the best (if not the best) ways to deal with this issue is not to have the field at all.

Some of the reasons for having the Gender field in the first place that were discussed in the previous issue include:

1. Making it easy for drupal.org users to identify their gender, e.g. so that people know what pronoun to use to refer to each other, or as a badge of pride for women in open source.
2. Allowing statistics on the gender of drupal.org users to be collected.
3. Not actually mentioned on the other issue (I think), but having a separate gender field allows use of the Profile module feature where you can click on the gender on someone's profile and see a list of other people with the same gender, e.g. http://drupal.org/profile/gender/female.

However, in response to each of these:

1. A textarea (perhaps with a description field that explicitly mentions gender as something you might want to share) would accomplish the same thing.
2. First, I'd question whether "people who filled out the gender field on their drupal.org profiles" is a good statistical representation of the actual Drupal community at all. Second, it is still possible to get statistical information if the data is contained in a textarea - you can choose a statistically significant sample at random (e.g. a few hundred user profiles) and actually look at what those people wrote in the textarea. This would be a bit harder than a simple database query, but would have the benefit that it could provide statistics on other things besides gender as well.
3. I'm not sure that in the case of gender this particular profile module feature is really important enough to keep.