Broken 'serialized storage' for custom fields

The event module lets admins add custom fields without adding a corrosponding column to the events table. In my testing, this works fine for inserting new events but these extra fields don't show up on the view and edit pages. I tried this with the following field (feel free to add this item to comments in fields.inc as an example of a 'select' field)

"gender"  => array("select", t("Gender"), false, true, true, '', array(0 => "-", "m" => t("male"), "f" => t("female")), t("description")),