Anyone else seeing fewer pronouns in the workplace?

[Pedestrian0]

I work in a large Stonewalled organisation. A couple of years ago everyone was fully 'she/her/hers' on Teams and in emails but I've noticed a real drop off recently and I'm so pleased. I think/hope people are getting a bit tired of the silly business. Now the pronoun-staters are very definitely in a minority.

I can also confidently say that pronouns on Teams or email have NEVER enhanced any interaction I've had at the company over the past five years. I've seen one they/them and frankly everyone referred to the obvious male as 'he' if we have reason to refer to him when he isn't around. It's not malicious, it's just the obvious pronoun to use for an obvious male. Everyone else just has sex-based pronouns. But - if you can't tell by the beard and obviously male features you can tell by the name 'John'. No need for the he/hims. It's really just virtue signalling and makes me eyeroll a lot.

I like that it's dropping away because the fewer people who do it, the more it'll drop out of fashion. But is it just my work or is anyone else seeing this?

My husband found this out recently as he heads a team in China and is very fond of one lady, Nancy, who has worked for him for over a decade.

He recently asked if he could use her Chinese name as he wanted to be respectful, and she pushed back and explained that he was already being respectful by using her ‘western’ name. He was taken aback but happy that he’d not been somehow been rude in all the years they’ve worked together.

How long will it be until some people realize fetch isn't going to happen?

I think/hope it's declining a bit. A year ago I was worried about the social contagion in my mostly young, female and very highly qualified team, but it does seem to have faltered a bit recently. Fingers crossed.

Thanks for the info about Chinese names - very interesting.

I still feel a little uneasy about the idea of people with 'foreign names' being asked to spell out their gender with English pronouns to avoid English speakers having to engage their brains, but I do understand why culturally it's harder to fight back against impolite colleagues.

But having said that - there's still absolutely no reason for anyone to be doing it for that reason on Teams or Zoom. Even if you aren't familiar with a Chinese or Japanese name you can see if a person is male or female.

The social contagion element is so interesting. For a while, pronouns were absolutely the majority on Teams calls. At least 3/4 of people. Now it's just one or two, and I do wonder if they sit there feeling a bit silly. Like bearded Dave is sitting there shouting 'I'm a man by the way everyone'.

I spend a lot of time in email correspondence with lawyers, mostly from big high profile firms. A couple of years ago there were lots of pronouns in signatures (always she/her, which seemed so pointless from people who were all obviously women by their name and photo). This year I think I have seen it once, maybe twice. Definitely a huge decrease.

Just curious if anyone else has been in these situations:

One of the receptionists at my GP is a transwoman and wears dresses/make-up, but sounds like a man. I realised that I had spoken to them a few weeks ago hen booking an appointment and had assumed that they were a man, but only clocked when I went in person that they were trans.

I had an online group meeting recently including a colleague I'd never met before. They had a female name and no pronouns in their email. Their camera wasn't working initially so they spoke to let us know they were trying to fix. Instantly I could tell it was a male voice. When they joined, I realised that they were trans.

Just curious, but it made me think what do these people do on phone calls when their gender is apparent through their voice but the person on the other end can't see them?

I think people who are "pronoun-staters" are self absorbed arseholes.... the sooner this ridiculousness stops the better!

Even more ridiculous than gender pronouns (though less ideological) are organisations that make you put a phonetic version of your name into your footer, to guide pronunciation, in the name of inclusivity.

In theory, it's a good idea to help people who are not native English speakers.

The whacking great flaw, though, is that the phonetic version of your name will be pronounced differently, depending on the speaker's language. For example, if your name in English is Jean, you might write the phonetic pronunciation as 'gene', but to a French-speaker, that's pronounced 'jhen', not 'jeen', and to an Italian it's gong to be more like 'jaynay'. No help at all, basically.

A phonetic translation might be helpful if you have a foreign (to the UK) name and work in a British company, but your British colleagues doing the same to be inclusive is totally pointlesss.

I think there are 3 types of pronoun-staters:

1. people who have given the issue zero thought and have just been prompted when setting up Outlook, or whatever

2. young to middle aged women who feel pressure to #BeKind

3. self-absorbed arseholes

There are quite a few men in category 2 at my workplace.

Earnest wide eyed inexperienced teachers of both sexes.

I'm thinking of one male chemistry teacher in particular; a genuinely kind bloke, little bit bumbling, well meaning, no critical thinking whatsoever. If I were to try to discuss it with him he probably wouldn't even try to follow my reasoning but just dismiss me in his mind as a poor fluffy woman who's out of touch. Like a stereotypical elderly aunt who says racist stuff (nb I'm not saying this stereotype actually exists). (And I'm not even middle aged lol)

I don’t mind this so much. I've only seen it for slightly less obvious names (Sian, or Siobhan) in contexts where there are a lot of service users from overseas who wouldn't be familiar with those names.
However, I do take your point that it would make more sense if they used the international phonetic alphabet!

This!

I had an overseas student who was very cross with me for (entirely unintentionally) mispronouncing their name and emailed me after class with a phonetic spelling that just didn't work for my northern accent so I annoyed them even more at the next class whilst thinking I had it correct although they wouldn't say so in class.

After the next indignant email, it suddenly dawned on me what the problem was and I had to patiently explain regional accents and how I might equally take offence at them berating me and ridiculing my working class vowels if I was so inclined.

It has never been a thing where I work, but I have regular contact from people in the NHS and local authorities. There has only ever been a smattering of pronouns, so has never really taken hold.

On LinkedIn it always pains though when I see someone I really respect professionally stating their pronouns though, and it is in almost all cases women.

On LinkedIn, it depends when people joined. All new joiners are now prompted for pronouns, so lots of people stating theirs on LinkedIn have probably given the issue no thought. I refrain from judgement unless they also have them in their email footer!

Just seen this poll on TwiX. Of nearly 72k respondents, 91.5% don’t use pronouns.

Am stunned it’s this high, and can’t help wonder if that figure has substantially changed in the last few weeks.

Sorry, I don't agree at all. Your accent in your primary language shouldn't prevent you from accurately reproducing a word, in this case someone's name, in another language. That would mean that someone with a strong regional or class accent could never speak a foreign language correctly.

And if anybody tried to 'patiently explain' to me why they weren't pronouncing my name accurately, it would make it worse!

Re pronouns: I saw a t-shirt the other day with a picture of a donkey and 'MY PRONOUNS ARE HE/HAW'

There's a difference between mispronunciation and a name sounding different in different accents. Even a standard UK name, e.g. David, sounds very different depending on whether it's said in a Welsh/Essex/Geordie/Brummie/Glasgow accent, but none of those is saying it wrongly.

Same with foreign (to the UK) names - but a foreign student who had only every heard RP English might not understand that. Not all countries have much regional variation in accent, so it is not necessarily obvious.

This is stupid, it’s well known for instance that Scottish people have real difficulty saying certain words and phrases, like burglar alarm for instance, I know lots of people who just can’t do it, it comes out burgelar alarm. English people are incapable of pronouncing Loch correctly and Chinese people really do have difficulty getting their tongue around certain sounds too.

I worked with someone called Eithne - but she didn’t pronounce it as “Enya”, which was very confusing.

@MarieDeGournay you may disagree but if you have never heard it said aloud but have only seen someone's phonetic spelling of it in writing and other English homophones that are supposed to tell me how to pronounce it (which I clearly do not pronounce the same as they expected me to) how on earth am I supposed to know how to pronounce it?

Do tell.

They never told me in person how to pronounce it only in writing.

Dineasair is right. It's one of the reasons there's said to be a childhood 'window' for learning a language perfectly. Babies gradually 'tune' into the features of the language they are exposed to and lose the ability to perceive differences which don't make contrasts in that language. Hard to describe but a real thing, and why it's so hard (for example) for us to say the vowel sound in 'tu' the exact way a French person would - part of the problem is that we don't even perceive that we're doing it wrong!

Oh boy, non-IPA phonetic spelling. A huge bugbear of mine.

Americans making TwitterX polls saying "how do you pronounce X in your accent" and all the options look completely bizarre to someone with a non-US accent.

British English speakers transcribing /ɑ/ as "ar" and confusing everyone with a rhotic accent.

Yes, I agree there are some sounds that are very difficult to hear and work out how to make them let alone pronounce them - I have a several Chinese students and I really struggle with some of the sounds but equally so do they with English words - we just laugh at each other in a respectful manner as a rule!

Same with some Danish sounds - very difficult to enunciate.

But the example I gave was not that - it was a vowel sound I could copy perfectly well if I heard it - but would never pronounce the written word that way in normal speech. As others have said the student had no idea of the existence of British accents nor the inherent classism that still prevails today. I have faced such prejudice my whole life.

You only have to look at Chat / AIBU to read endless threads on how to pronounce a certain word unto see that there is often no consensus - words such as bath, laugh, scone being prime examples.

It would be more straightforward to put a word like :man" or "woman" or maybe male or female in the signature. Adding in a pronouns is really a rather obscure way to do it. Or a photo could work.

Of course there are clear reasons that some might not want to of those things but using pronouns to indicate sex doesn't solve those problems.