Under the SuperStream data and payments standard, providing an employee's gender is a mandatory requirement for superannuation contributions.
This information, along with the employee's full name, Tax File Number (TFN), date of birth, and address, is used for the accurate identification and tracking of contributions to the correct superannuation accounts. The gender of the employee advised in the contributions report will be matched with that of the gender the employee is registered as with the ATO.
This requirement is outlined in the Super Data and Payments Standard Contributions Message Implementation Guide (Contributions MIG), specifically in section 6.4.6, which states that "The superannuation fund member data content of a Contribution Transaction Request MUST conform with the specifications in the Contribution Transaction Request – Superannuation Fund Member Data content Table."
To meet the current SuperStream standard requirements of the "gender" field needing to be populated, we offer a "Not specified" gender option, which maps to the ATO taxonomy of "Not stated or inadequately described."