These email pronouns at work

Are you offended by people who sign off God Bless or say inshallah?

I wouldn't be 'offended', but I'd think either of those was unprofessional and inappropriate in a work context (unless you work in a religious organisation of some sort).

I have quietly refused to put my pronouns in my email signature. I just haven’t done it. I was recently asked to state my name, job title and pronouns in a meeting recently and I omitted them. It’s perfectly obvious what sex and gender I am. I raised the point after the training that making people state their pronouns is unfair on those that don’t know or haven’t decided or just feel like they’re stating the obvious.

I'm going to say 'no'.

If pressed? 'Because I don't want to'.

In meetings, 'that's not a practice I follow'.

No debate.

At some point it may be suggested that I do it at work, it is getting slightly more common in the NHS, but I've no plans to do anything except ignore it. I'm certainly not going to draw attention to myself by coming up with a 'funny' response, nor will I discriminate against people who choose to do it.

Not my first rodeo. These fads happen and they go away again. If by some unknown chance something about it turns out to be useful rather than a forceful attempt to change the culture, I suppose it will stick around.

I always wonder why just pronouns.

There's a lady in my office whose voice is astonishingly high pitched.

Maybe she should put "highly strung" in her signature to avoid astonishment?

Actually I should let everyone know the things I find surprising about them the first time I meet them, so they can add all of those things to help people understand them better.

"Sound blacker than I look, don't eat pork"
"Posh voice but didn't go to private school"
"Catholic, 13 kids"
"Homosexual, just adopted a teenager"
"Work from home, elderly parent care"

It'll be rather helpful to get all the alarm bells, sorry, I mean prejudices, no, not those, err helpful hints, going before conversation begins.

Even if people do put pronouns on their emails, if you've never met them you don't know that their prononuns match their chosen gender, so it's pointless anyway.
It's a useful marker to know who's minds are so open that their brains have fallen out though.

Ah, but it does make a difference. Men have an authority advantage. People will always listen more to their points, take the, more seriously, allow them to interrupt. Etc etc
plenty of evidence and studies show this
in turn that leads to pay gap along with all the other unconscious bias stuff women at work deal with- how are performance management reviews are more likely to contain personal critism in guise of feedback than mens (too agressive, calm down, show less frustration etc etc ). Agian numerous blind studies have shown this

interestingly I’ve been dealing with a number of government bodies and private companies on a legal issue relating to my property. It’s all in writing. I always sign my name by just initials and surname. I’m taken quite seriously - but am always addressed as Mr buildersteamaker . I don’t correct them .

im not going to make life more difficult by announcing to the world I’m a women if I don’t need to. So the pronoun stuff matters- it really does. Becuase it just reinforces gender stereotyping.

im old enough to remember when the general consensus was the whole gender notion was a bad thing - gender was simply a stereotype perception of females and males and we need to dump those stereotypes. Trans activist just don’t seem to get this very point - ..no one is benefitting by gender stereotyping. Their own lives would be easier without it -as a famous women said, wear what you want, live your best lives…but stop pigeonholing people into stereotypes.

I’ve just stated a new job, quite a few people have pronouns in their signature, I’d say 90%+ of them are female, I imagine being kind. No one has asked me to add mine, or told me how, but I would decline if asked. Interestingly I haven’t seen anyone with pronouns from our other European offices.

My previous firm had started to add them, but you were only allowed to choose from he/she/they (or a combo eg he/they). Wonder what they’ll do when the neo pronoun crew come knocking?

I know it isn't but I was trying to explain to the quoted poster that the pronouns were nothing to do with sex so there was no need to use them to show others she was a female. Her explanation for using them was based on false reasoning.

And to me, I don't have a gender, so it's completely irrelevant.

To me, my gender has nothing to do with my work and I like people to use my name, and know that I'm human.I can't see how any of that is unkind.

Gender isn't actually real.

I do a lot of work with a domestic violence charity and I'm pretty sure amongst the many logos in their email signatures is a Black Lives Matters one! Some sectors have become incredibly political.
That being said, there is a stark contrast between the staff specifically supporting ethnic minority victims and those who work across the board choosing to put pronouns in their signatures or not. I'll let you guess which way round it goes.

I find it more misogynistic to have to declare whether I am married or not. Also, a lot of people sign off with full name and so wouldn't naturally include the Mr, Mrs, Ms. Also, in my work a lot of people's title is Dr so that doesn't actually help with knowing their gender. Also, those titles don't cover they / them pronouns. I guess the equivalent would be Mx, but it's kind of weird and not everyone knows what it means.

I personally don't have pronouns because I simply don't care, I'm a woman and have a standard woman's name. But I don't think that it's inappropriate to choose to share them. It 's not a religion. It might be an ideology on a very loose interpretation of "ideology" but so what? Are you offended by people who sign off God Bless or say inshallah?

Not so long ago we were pushing to hide sex in the workplace as much as possible because of the well established fact that females face discrimination simply for being female. CVs were submitted with initials instead of full names. Cover letters were carefully worded. I’m 48. I’m not talking about the dark ages here. Now we are supposed to declare our sex in every interaction.

I don’t think the people making these signatures have really spent the time to consider the ramifications of their choices. They consider the positive impact in one regard, but not the negative consequences for so many others.

they know they are on the correct side in terms of acceptance and tolerance. I completely agree with them on that. So there is no controversy if you just look at the issue at that level. It’s a shallow level of examination though. It’s the messy little details that are worthy of debate and discussion that raise legitimate controversy. It’s hard to separate those out though, because for every person who does want to focus on the implications of muddying statistics by mixing sex and gender or the safety of male bodies in female prisons, there are plenty of people who just hate those that want to be act and dress differently than societal expectations. I suspect the pronoun people feel like they are taking a justifiable stand against that hatred, without thinking about the implicit endorsement of problematic policies.

Errol I would say not knowing the sex is often a huge advantage

From my perspective anyway 😀

I was named after my father so a name that could easily be for a man or woman. It's never been an issue for me although being married to someone with another ambiguous name it has been funny at functions where people were seated male/female alternately at tables and they've guessed the wrong way round for us. Swapping the place name cards wasn't very traumatic.

Totally agree.
It's not a neutral thing to do, it's bullshit.

We're mostly Drs and many nationalities, lots of different locations... not knowing someone's sex has never been a problem.

The email pronouns are nothing to do with your sex. Its to do with your gender. Gender and sex are different.

We have a lot of Dr in our place so mr Mrs doesn't help

@AgathaAllAlong we have Ms, Mrs, Mr, Miss to resolve any confusion if someone has an ambiguous or unfamiliar name but isn't present. The pronoun ritual is an ideological/religious statement.

www.bva.co.uk/media/2988/gender-discrimination-in-the-vet-profession-bva-workforce-report-nov-2018.pdf

This is the experiment conducted by the British Vets. I may have been a tad confused about the specifics, but the results were undeniable.

So no. I will never be reinforcing my sex in my signature block or in any way at work.

Anyone who honestly thinks that negative sexist discrimination is 'not a thing' and cannot see how 'pronouns' will negatively impact females in the workplace perhaps has not thought about it deeply enough.

My name is Prince

And my pronouns are fun/ky

I, too, was thinking of the male & female colleagues who used each other's email accounts for a while. I hadn't heard of the vet experiment (the 'we would pay the males more' really made me seethe).

There was a similar experiment done with recruiting for orchestras, in which the musician playing their audition piece was hidden from view, & the number of women who were chosen was higher than when it was obvious which were men & which were women.

I also love Sister Wendy Beckett talking about a painting which was taken as being by a male artist & nobody had a bad word to say about it; then it was reattributed to a woman, & suddenly the painting developed a number of faults!😂