Use the pronouns they/them/their.
Honorifics exist in other languages to provide a solution to using a gendered way to describe someone. The pronoun they is a candidate to provide a similar option in English.
They should be applicable to an individual and be correct grammar.
Let’s look at some examples:
Sarah/John came in for an interview yesterday.
**He** made a presentation on product strategy to our Directors.
**She** made a presentation on product strategy to our Directors.
Notice how separable gender is from the operational content of what is happening. While the names of people may give away their gender, pronouns form a major chunk of how we refer to them in writing. This ranges from a person working at the top of a company to a prospect just out of college looking for an unpaid gig. Revisiting the two sentences with a more neutral and honorific pronouns gives us this:
Sarah/John came in for an interview yesterday.
**They** made a presentation on product strategy to our Directors.
**They** made a presentation on product strategy to our Directors.
Male/female/other don’t make as much of a difference any more. We remove a biased distraction that exists without core purpose. People get an honorific level, adding gravity. Their actions — the things that matter, come into focus. A writer doesn’t have to pick a gendered pronoun for generic statements about a random person doing something.
Grammar
People might say this is bad grammar. I believe that English grammar limits our ability to focus on actions. Rather than establish a new word I think the path of least resistance is to open up usage of the existing _they/their_ family. A side effect with this is that we have to be ok with sentences like:
**They** are running their first marathon.
Where they could refer to a single person or many people. The listener would resolve based on context. I think this is a worthy compromise. Several well developed languages (Spanish, Hindi) make similar decisions.
Institutional Process — Hiring
The involvement of gender during the hiring process is an interesting problem to consider. There are some processes for which gendered information is necessary. There are some where it is futile and signal eroding. Hiring a buff guy to be a bouncer makes sense. Homing in on the gender of, say, a new sales manager during the application process adds bias to the job. Especially to the job that is agnostic to the gender of a candidate. Managers need to understand all the different factors that can affect their employees. They need tools to sift through them for analysis. What I feel they don’t get enough of is tools to drop unnecessary variables altogether.
Institutional Process — Beyond Hiring
The presence of gender in writing beyond hiring is much simpler. There is almost no need for it. Focus on the actions, focus on the outcomes. Bring it in only when needed — gender related benefits, special needs and so on.
Conclusion
This essay doesn’t claim to have answers for all the questions on how gender biases can influence people. It aims to provide a method of easy traction to get started on equalizing unnecessary biases. We write, all the time, everywhere. Let’s abstract gender away when we can. If you have thoughts on this, let me know.
EDIT — I got some good feedback on the limitations of this approach from this thread:
While the problem is complicated, often offering trade-offs between removing bias and situational specificity, Sweden seems to be headed towards a good solution:
EDIT 2 — The Washington Post now accepts it in their style guide.
