For most of these demographic questions, there are a few things to do to immediately be more inclusive:
Many surveys ask about gender and sex and looking at your data along these lines can be interesting. There are things to consider when asking about these facets.
First - sex and gender are not interchangable. Sex refers to the anatomical and biological characteristics of a person, generally as they appear at birth. Gender refers to the social and cultural differences that are applied to a person. Neither of these traits are binary. If you've determined you need to ask about sex or gender on your survey, these formats are more inclusive:
Sex:
Gender:
* It may be important to know if someone is transgender. In this case, it's recommend that you add options for trans man, trans woman, cis man, and cis woman. Cis is a term that refers to people who were born the sex that corresponds to their gender identity. This term is not known by everyone, so you may need to define it in your survey. Another option is to add a separate question asking if someone is trans or cis.
Sexual orientation refers to what people a person is attracted to. If you've determined you need to know sexual orientation of your participants, these are some more inclusive terms to include in the question. Note that some terms have different definitions and you may want to define terms in your question.
Sexual orientation:
When asking about family or household members, remember that not all families look the same. Family or household members may include:
Like gender and sex, people sometimes make the mistake of lumping race and ethnicity together. They are separate things, though, and should be treated that way. Race refers to characteristics a person is born with and may relate to skin color and other physical characteristics. Ethnicity is related to where a person comes from, their beliefs, customs, and/or traditions.
There are many ways to ask about race and ethnicity depending on the information you're looking for. Data collected about race and ethnicity tend to be messy and unless it's truly something you need for your research, it might not be worth asking.
If you've decided you need to ask questions about race or ethnicity, this blog post from QuestionPro offers some good approaches to take with these questions.
Some broad rules of thumb include:
Religion tends to be a bit more straightforward than race and ethnicity. Like the other topics on this page, be sure to include an Other option, a None option, and a Prefer not to answer options. Which religions you choose to enumerate can be based on the most common religions in your region or the region(s) where your survey participants are located.
An example:
What is your religion or religious philosophy?