The Promise and Peril of Pronouns in the Workplace
Personal pronouns, like ‘she’ ‘he’ and ‘they,’ are easy ways to communicate gender in English — our own or the gender of someone we want to describe to someone else. But there is nothing obvious or immutable about our gender identities. As more and more people lay claim to their gender identity or challenge gender binaries altogether, expressing one’s own gender and respectfully acknowledging someone else’s gender have become even more complex and dynamic.
What if you started a job as a contractor and then had the chance to apply for a full-time position? Do you wait to share your pronouns of choice or do you risk employment opportunities? And what happens when you move to a state or country that no longer recognizes or honors the pronouns that represent you? The risks of misgendering only increase in formal work settings, where people may be meeting for the first time over communication technologies that bind them to an organizational setting shot through with power dynamics.
Our paper aimed to understand how people navigate sharing their personal pronouns at work and how they learn the personal pronouns of their coworkers. After nearly two years of work, ranging from 78 semi-structured qualitative interviews with transgender and queer people, HR and IT professionals, and international LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations and working with an engineering team dedicated to making pronoun sharing a more fluid yet safe experience, we concluded that sharing pronouns is, paradoxically, a deeply individual moment of self-presentation and a complex act of group-level social communication. Using technological systems to share personal pronouns can, sometimes, flatten or hide how pronoun-sharing is (also) an ongoing communication process rather than a single act of information retrieval.
Unfortunately, current profile design standards encode a person’s identity as a static field — a dropdown menu or open dialogue box —rather than reflecting the reality that identity is social and changes over time, across different contexts. As many companies currently seek to design or implement new software tools to facilitate pronoun-sharing among employees, now is an opportune time for software developers to pause and rethink design standards for profiles and identity information storage. Pronoun-sharing tools encapsulate the tension between dynamic social processes of self-expression and established systems of classification and information retrieval.
Many social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, now allow their users to select and display their pronouns in their profiles. But less is known about pronoun-sharing in professional contexts such as a workplace or a school. These professional settings are distinct from other social contexts in which pronoun-sharing tools have been adopted in recent years. Social media platforms have quite different social stakes than workplace collaboration software. In educational and corporate settings, institutions tend to structure social relationships as formalized hierarchies whereas social media platforms operate on the (often unrealized) promise of equal access for all. Social media users are not unified by their subordination to the rules and expectations of a CEO, an HR department, or their boss in the same way that employees using workplace collaboration software are.
Pronoun sharing tools built on an assumption that gender is a straightforward matter of information provision fail to adequately account for the needs of trans and nonbinary people because they do not provide for the contextual and social aspects of pronoun sharing in the workplace. When prompted simply to input pronouns in a software profile, trans and nonbinary people are faced with myriad complex concerns about professional security, discrimination and bias, and interpersonal relationships. With no supplemental education or widespread conversation about trans and nonbinary identities, pronoun use, and the complexities of gender expression through language, it can be easy for cisgender coworkers to dismiss pronoun sharing practices as superficial political correctness and thus prevent widespread adoption of this feature.
Trans and nonbinary people are unlikely to use a pronouns feature that lacks adequate audience and visibility controls, since they are highly conscious of the reality that they may face bias and discrimination if their identities are made known to unsafe audiences who can influence their professional future. Pronoun use is also context-driven, with people often using different sets of pronouns as they navigate different workplace cultures, express their gender identity in different ways over time, and communicate with different professional audiences.
In sum, current pronoun sharing software does not allow for the complex decision making practices and communicative acts that trans people must engage in when they share pronouns in the workplace. We found that a few key insights guide the way forward:
- Software users must have dynamic control of visibility and audience settings for pronouns.
- Design should prioritize flexibility and user autonomy over profile continuity.
- Local subject matter experts in gender, sexuality, and language should be integral to ongoing iterative design processes.
- We need success metrics that evaluate the extent to which pronoun-sharing tools support informed self-expression and user safety rather than measuring adoption rate — downloads or adoption rates cannot tell the full story.
Most importantly, however, the success of what we consider a sociotechnical system will depend on approaching the development of technologies, from ideation to a system’s evolution, from the vantage point of those often least visible but most in need of a technical system accounting for their needs as core to the build.
To learn more, read our complete paper at https://doi.org/10.1145/3579516.
