Active discussions

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Feminism: chat

Original poster

Can you help me phrase something about gender very carefully for a work document

53 replies

AttillaThePlum · 25/09/2023 09:34

I have been asked to comment on a colleague's thoughts about gender and EDI from my own (non legal) expert perspective.

Most of it I can do, because my advice is that as a company we should keep our heads down and stay out of it, not least because everything is going to go batshit around the election.

HOWEVER. I need to address this sentence. "we’ve included a simple sentence in our recent report: “while the language in this report speaks of young women and young men, these categories refer to gender identities and we recognise that gender is not binary.”].

I need to say that a) this is disputed and not everyone believes this and the right to say so is protected and b) I need to say this to someone who was once an equalities expert but has not worked as such for five years and so may not be across Maya Forstater etc but c) if I get one single thing wrong this person will jump on me like a lion that hasn't seen a gazelle in weeks and d) has recently shafted me massively over another project.

Which would be something like that this is an opinion, not a fact and it is an opinion which is protected - and then I run out of sensible words. Can you bring your collective expertise to bear and help me get it right?

Thank you.

OP posts:
KnickerlessParsons · 25/09/2023 09:42

Could the report just refer to "young people" rather than making the distinction between men and women?

If the report needs to make that distinction, then how was the data collected? What was the wording of the question where responders were able to choose whether they were either a young man or a young woman? Or even "young" at all.

popebishop · 25/09/2023 09:38

I would point out that many women and men don't consider themselves to have genders. Some women identify as agender and so saying "a woman is a gender identity" excludes such people.

I would also ask them to clarify how they have distinguished between young women and young men, and to state clearly that they are not using male/female but to give the criteria they have actually used to determine whether a person is a woman or a man.

I think it depends on the rest of it too - if it's an EDI document is this the only reference to gender?

AliceOlive · 25/09/2023 09:38

Who is the “we” and who is the audience?