To ‘she’ or not to ‘she’? The culture war in your outbox

Employers are asking staff to add their pronouns – he/him, she/her, ze/hir in their email signature. But will it mean greater inclusivity - or exclusion?

Young women on a gay pride march.

It’s the biggest question in modern email etiquette. Should you add your pronouns – he/him, she/her, they/them; ze/hir or one of an increasing number of expressions of gender identity – beside your name in your email signature, indicating how you wish to be referred to by colleagues or clients? And is this a move towards greater inclusivity, or one that excludes people with different views?

Pronouns are another front in the culture wars. Last week, Oliver Dowden, the Conservative Party’s co-chairman, partly blamed a fixation on what people want to be called for the decline of the West. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in Washington on Monday, Dowden said: “A West confident in its values would not be obsessing over pronouns.”

The increased adoption of them has sparked a backlash too: the private members’ club Soho House was mocked this month for asking its clientele to pick from a list of 41 pronouns.

The practice of adding pronouns to emails seems to have started in academic and charity circles about five years ago, and then spread to the corporate world, where it is common in industries such as publishing and tech, with bosses starting to request all staff add them.

Among the organisations that encourage staff to share their pronouns in correspondence is the law firm Clifford Chance, which employs a “global inclusion specialist” to advise staff that including pronouns can show “both internally and externally that you are a visible ally [to trans and non-binary people] and understand the importance of pronouns to some people”. The NHS offers guidance to employees on how to add them to their email signatures. In 2020, a BBC executive told staff that adding their pronouns was “a simple but important move towards creating a more inclusive workplace”.

Suki Sandhu, the founder of Audeliss, a recruitment firm that focuses on diversity, believes that adding pronouns to email signatures benefits staff and company culture more widely. “It signals that the company is an inclusive workplace for those who are LGBT+ and saves people who have unexpected pronouns or have changed their pronouns having to explain and correct them several times a day.”

This isn’t just of benefit to the trans community, he adds. “Many women will be able to relate to how often they are mistakenly referred to as ‘he’ if they have a gender-neutral name – especially if they are in a relative position of power where people still default to assuming they are a man,” says Sandhu.

But not everyone feels comfortable with having this imposed. An employee at a marketing company where all staff were advised to add their pronouns to their email signatures said that he worried about being labelled a transphobe if he did not comply, though a nagging voice told him he didn’t like the idea.

Simon Fanshawe, one of the founders of the gay rights charity Stonewall and now a consultant on workplace diversity, says such moves are coercive. “It plays into a notion of gender ideology that you need to state that you have a gender identity separate from your sex and therefore buys into an ideology that most people don’t agree with. It’s divisive.”

Fanshawe argues that it can also harm others. “A lot of women – especially in science – do not want to say what their sex is, as it disadvantages them, for example in citations,” he says. “And some trans people don’t like this idea either: it raises something about them they don’t wish to disclose.”

Pronoun refuseniks, beware: your boss may well be coming for your email signature. Time to decide what you like to be called.

The Sunday Times