A staff member has recently been awarded a PhD. I changed the title from Mr to Dr in HR manager, and it reset the gender to unknown without any kind of prompt or warning message. This doesn't really seem in keeping with GDPR because it's an inappropriate deletion of data. Ideally it would not affect the gender field at all, but if it must there should at least be a pop-up question of "would you like to remove the saved gender record?"
It seems a little odd to change it to "Unknown" given it's already been set, and when getting a PhD it is only their title that changes.
If the gender is blank, I can see auto updating of the gender to be helpful for some of the titles (e.g. Mr/Miss/Mrs), but not for others (e.g. Dr) - for titles like Dr maybe the gender field could be left alone altogether (rather than actively setting it to "Unknown").