The old policy required you to select male, female, or other. So you had companies like Ford and ABC News creating profiles and having to choose what gender the company is. They mostly picked other. Which just seems awkward. Now you won’t have to anymore and if you’ve chosen one you can make it not public. What this points to, besides a good topic for a term paper in a Gender Studies & Economics college course, is that G+ is already having to figure out how to adapt its platform for the commercial interests who want in. It’s already outgrowing the idea of being a hangout spot for people, the corporations want in and have been willing to manufacture a gender identity to do so.