I am currently building a simple application in Django and am trying to settle on a good model design.

First Approach

In the Django documentation and many blog posts I have read, the choice keyword argument is recommended. This would be implemented in my (simplified) noun model like so:

class Noun(models.Model):
    FEMININE = 0
    MASCULINE = 1
    NEUTER = 2
    COMMON = 3
    GENDER_TYPE = (
        (FEMININE, "Feminine"),
        (MASCULINE, "Masculine"),
        (NEUTER, "Neuter"),
        (COMMON, "Common"),
    )
    stem = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    gender = models.IntegerField(choices=GENDER_TYPE, default=Noun.COMMON)

Second Approach

When I walked across the hallway and spoke to a db admin friend about how he would indicate enumerations in a database, he acknowledged debate but said that he would make a table for each enumeration and reference it by foreign key. This approach maps almost exactly to the following models:

class Gender(models.Model):
    short_name = models.CharField(max_length=1) # M, F, N, or C
    description = models.CharField(max_length=20) # Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, or Common

class Noun(models.Model):
    stem = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    gender = models.ForeignKey(Gender, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

I am trying to weigh the relative merits of each approach. Here are the pro’s and con’s I can discern:

First Approach

1. Encapsulated
2. No need to import a “Gender” model
3. Does not require extra step of populating enumeration values in the database
4. Easier to read in the code: I do not need to look at the database to see the valid values

Second Approach

1. Much more flexible: I can change all feminine words to masculine in one step, or add a new gender without having to modify the noun table
2. The logic is enforced by a foreign key constraint rather than the code, preserving data integrity

So, my question: Am I missing something obvious about why one approach is invalid? If both approaches are valid, which approach is better?