To reinstate Mr/Ms/Mx on your email signatures

[Kreftla]

I don’t care what people call themselves, I care about how they would like be referred to (extended to those people who shorten your name when they don’t ask!). I don’t use he/she, I always use ‘they’ when I don’t know someone’s name, my mother always said ‘She is the cat’s mother’. Still no idea what that means, but I hate being called ‘she’ and would never say my pronouns as I don’t care how people refer to me when I’m not there.

So, why don’t we just go back to titles? We have to do them on most forms. You can say if you want to be referred to as a Dr/Lord/Ms/Mx/Master etc. You can add them to your email signature if you want, HR/recruitment people will see it and can advise the interviewer accordingly. Nobody then has to ask about pronouns in a work environment as it’s on your email signature etc., if you want it to be.

I would largely agree, but one benefit that has come out of our company’s advice on signatures is putting pronunciations after names in brackets. We work for an international company and that’s helped me so much when calling to speak to someone after an email exchange. I have a visual memory and when people say things it goes out the window, but seeing it written down with the pronunciation and original spelling helps me so much.

It's actually quite hard to write a pronounciation in a completely unambiguous way unless both reader and writer understand phonetic symbols or it's full of "as in" examples.

How, for example, should my Brazilian colleague Julio write his?

It is not "HOO Lee Oh" or "ch (as in loch) OO Lee o" but actually

J as in the sound you make when you get to the "s" in "measure"

OOL-yo.

And that's before we go anywhere near tonal languages like Mandarin.

We're looking into using clickable sound files, where you record your name and it's embedded in the sig.

I agree. I'm a TA In school , suddenly Mrs and others Miss because kids need to know if we are married or not. I hate it actually. I like the bit of respect but male teachers are Mr, and that's enough

I prefer not to use a title. If anyone at work makes the assumption I'm a man, it's probably going to work in my favour anyway.

So many people at my workplace have their pronouns in their signature block, e.g.

Name (she/her)
Title
Department Name
Phone etc

We are an extremely large public sector organisation. I have not done this.

One thing that has me confused is that I have seen (she/they) a couple of times. I really don't get this one - are they she sometimes and they other times? How do you tell? If anyone can tell me I would appreciate it.

That's even worse than pronouns!

If I know what someone's pronouns are I use them. If I don't, I always use she/her. A tiny personal kick back against all the years of he/him being the default.

Can I ask how many people you regularly come into contact with? Because remembering this much information about so many people cannot be sustainable.

I am from a big family with many first cousins, who have children and grandchildren. I've lived in 4 different major cities. I work for global companies employing 1000s on multiple projects with multiple teams across many cultures and timezones including many third party individuals. My kids go to big schools and have lots of hobbies - as do I - with ever changing casts of team mates, friends, associates, colleagues and teachers. What I'm saying is I've spent my entire life dealing regularly with 1000s of different people from many cultures. And I'm not unusual - surely most people have similar networks.

I have a good memory (my job involves dealing with lots of ever-changing information at any one time) but at best I am going to remember first name, maybe surname and, given that we're talking about people from all over the world, - my correct pronunciation and sexing on most is going to be about 50:50. Throw titles and pronouns into the mix - forget it. I know many people whose names get misspelt, mispronounced for years, even by close friends and they generally shrug it off. I have a name that is usually shortened but I prefer the long version and generally people ask then always shorten it. I don't really care. I sometimes get called a different name altogether. I don't even have a title - I'm Miss on some and Ms on others but I'm also married so who knows?

Who the fuck cares about this trivia?

Let's just go the whole hog and add all our qualifications and our dates of birth to our signatures instead.

Well stop doing that

Well OP you have offended me, my title is Mrs and i refuse to be referred as Ms or whatever the hell Mx is. Not really but i can't be arsed with all the crap of this modern mixed up world. And i still don't know what Mx is.

Don't tempt providence.

At first reading I thought the OP's idea could come across a bit pompous. But it is growing on me. A device to ward off the pronoun queries. Simple but effective I imagine.

The thing about adding a title in the past (after the name) was because people always assumed the person was a man because few woman worked /worked in particular roles. I think it does matter when people assume the professional to be a male.

Unfortunately my title is unisex so is of no help. A shortened version of my name is also unisex so I just use my full name on my email signature.

Most people read my name and assume I’m a young, white male scouser, which works in my favour in the industry I’m in. It flummoxes them when they meet me and realise I’m a middle aged black woman - usually by that point, my work has spoken for itself, so they are forced to get onboard, hence why I would never add pronouns to my email signature. Well, that and the fact that it feels so redundant when you work in an organisation as large as the one I work for. I have colleagues I have been communicating for years - we’ve never met, we’ll probably never meet, so why do they need my pronouns when they just use my name?

I've always given my title as "Ms" as it's nobody's business whether or not I'm married.

It's also nobody's business how I identify!

Just call me by my first name!

What if you don't have English as your first language? Johann is a typically male name and could easily be confused with Joanna.

How? Joanna is a woman's name and Johann is a man's name. If something so simple is confusing for you then fine. But don't expect the rest of the world to pander to you.

I deal with Indian colleagues all the time and often have no idea whether they're male or female. And guess what? It's completely irrelevant to how I interact with them.

I don't think people even notice
My female name (say Samantha) is my email address and my signature

So many emails "Hi Samuel"

I could add a photo of my boobs to my signature and people would still reply with Samuel so adding she/her/Miss/I'm fucking female would make no difference

When I was single I was Ms, when I was married I enjoyed being Mrs, and now I'm divorced I'd quite like to take Mx because I like how it sounds/looks...but it seems to signal something in particular that probably isn't me...I actually have no idea!

It's all very reductive and all too busy "signalling" something, and I really can't be doing with it!

I thought Mx was meant to be gender neutral/non-binary which I think is a load of rubbish anyway so make sure you know what you're signalling before you decide to use it!

that's exactly the issue @Moopsi - I don't mind at all if it's gender-neutral because I would hope my gender is irrelevant (we can hope...it's just not happened yet!) but I don't want the assumption that I'm non-binary...if that even means anything which I very much doubt it does; 20 year old me would have signed up for that straight away but thankfully I'm older and wiser!

How does that work for people who are, for example, genderfae or any of the myriad of other 'genders', or use xe/xir/xirs or ze/zir/zirs

We've swapped one for another in which some people lie and we are supposed to pretend this is normal.