So, sometimes, In your application you may want to handle things in your User model like sex (female, male) or other static lists. You don’t like ENUM. You want these lists to be handled using ‘textual keys’ in your application but stored in your database using codes in an integer column. You don’t want to join other tables to display these information. You want these lists to be easily ordered, localized and translated using Rails i18n.You want view helpers to display these lists localized and validations helpers to validate the values in the ‘receiving’ model. That’s why we wrote static_list. It’s just a gem install away !