Gender and Pronouns in Job Application Forms

[MahoosivePaws]

I'm applying for jobs at the moment. It's very tempting to screenshot all of the different confused permutations of sex and gender questions that get asked, so I can show how utterly useless the data being collected is across well respected organisations.

I'm just picking 'prefer not to say' wherever I can - but I have a question to those of you who are involved in recruitment. Is this 'Equal Opportunities' info visible to you? I would hate to think that an application that I work hard on gets rejected by someone who doesn't like how I responded to a question. I've got one today where the pronouns question is mandatory and it's absolutely infuriating.

When I get job applications, the Equal Opportunities information is always removed. It's a monitoring form, not part of the application.

Unless I had to, this would stop me applying as I wouldn’t want to work anywhere that forced this stuff.Its mad these employers for whom recruitment takes time and money would alienate groups of possible good candidates like this.

Equalities information is always optional and is not part of selecting people for interview. (unless the employer has schemes to guarantee interviews to ,for example, all disabled people who meet the minimum criteria, but then this would be asked about as part of the main application form and not taken from the Equalities form.

There was an interesting article in the Guardian yesterday about how useless data collection on sex/gender is becoming and the risks this poses.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/20/uk-data-recording-biological-sex-gender-identity-report

I never volunteer any information about myself. These questions are always optional or have a 'Prefer not to say' option. I just applied for a job and put 'Prefer not to say' for all E&D questions (your preferred pronouns, gender assigned at birth, gender you now identify with, age, race, etc). Do any of those things have a bearing on whether I can do the job? No. So they can piss off with their stupid questions. Also, I figure if enough of us don't answer them then maybe, just maybe one day they won't bother asking any more.

Unfortunately the mortgage doesn't pay itself, so I can't be that picky.

I also think the application form is often on a commercial platform that companies are using - they haven't necessarily built each question out themselves from scratch. But it still feels like sticking my head above the parapet to answer anything other than 'Female' to a gender question or 'Woman' to a sex question or whatever other inappropriate but non controversial option I have.

To what purpose are they monitoring??

I don't know that they can be monitoring anything useful. Given that so many people just 'prefer not to say' to every question, it's got to be a pretty useless set of data.

Sounds very ominous though!

It does. What pronouns you insist people use for you shouldn’t be any part of an equal opportunities initiative.

It is just bad all round.

If I were a pronoun person, I (if blessed with any self awareness at all) would be concerned about getting rejected from a job by a terrible bigoted person.

As a person who thinks preferred pronouns are ridiculous - I'm worried about getting rejected from a job by a terrible bigoted person (with blue hair).

I never know if putting 'prefer not to say' will get counted as 'no answer' or 'probably trans, just not out'.

Drives me nuts when there's no sex question, only gender. How exactly are they monitoring their recruitment (or whatever) for sex discrimination without recording sex?!

I completely get what you say @MahoosivePaws

How exactly are they monitoring their recruitment (or whatever) for sex discrimination without recording sex?!

They are not. They are fudging it and counting the Lea Thomases of the world as female, thus distorting the figures for any quotas they have for male/female, or e.g. monitoring how female pay rates relate to male rate.

The data is anonymised. The data and your application will be immediately separated. The purpose is to see whether the people applying are reflective of wider society and if the people going on to get the job are more or less likely based on protected characteristics.

For example, if half the people who apply are women, but only 20% of successful candidates are women, maybe there is something going on in the application process which disadvantages women. If only 20% of applicants are women then maybe the advert is worded in such a way that women are discouraged from applying.

If 20% of the UK population is non-white, you'd want applications to be reflective of that too, along with LGBT, marital status, disability, and religious affiliation.

About 0.5% of the population are trans so you'd probably expect 1 in 200 applicants to be trans and 1 in 200 employees to be trans. If it's not, you might want to have a rough idea of why that is the case.

Further on in the process, it's used to see whether or not having a PC is a barrier to promotion. It's no good having 50% of your workforce being women, if all of them are low paid admin assistants.

Insisting on people’s pronouns will give no indication of the relative proportions of actual male/female applicants.
It’s meaningless in an equal opportunities setting.

Gender reassignment is a protected characteristic so it might feed into data on that. The question was whether it will be used in assessing the application. It won't. The specific pronouns question you mention is probably because they want to know how to address you if you are invited to interview; other data is gathered so they can identify weaknesses in the recruitment process.

Whether you agree with it or not is neither here nor there.

There wasn't a question about Gender Reassignment. A whole host of assumptions would have to be made to arrive at a conclusion that the applicant had the protected characteristic of GR...which would be totally inappropriate to do.

As for pronouns, if they're being used to address you when invited for interview - then that data is not being kept anonymous and away from the hiring manager.

Quite…

I'm also job searching and I find it quite fascinating from a data privacy perspective. At my work, we are careful never to capture personal information because its not needed, but somehow all this stuff is being asked on every job application.
It'd be completely unacceptable to ask someone to confirm their sexual orientation in a face-to-face interview but somehow it's okay to ask it in online when you're also capturing name, address, phone number etc.
I had one also ask about pregnancy recently and another about physical concerns 'like IBS'
I always put 'prefer not to say' but I find it bizarre that in an age when almost every other business sphere is racing as far away from PII as they can, HR departments are merrily tacking it to every application.

It's not being used to assess your application and is no different to having a title like Mr or Mrs on there. It's not necessarily anything to do with their approach to gender; it might be as simple as not wanting to create an awkward situation if someone having a gender neutral name and it isn't immediately obvious, especially if it's an online interview.

The part of the form about characteristics is detached from the rest of the application before sift.

Monitoring is useful - if it turns out that, say, 100s of women/disabled people/Asian people with appropriate qualifications apply for jobs with a particular institution, but no-one ever gets appointed, it raises questions, and might indicate a need for training on unconscious bias. For this reason I do fill out 'race', sex and disability section. For gender, I tick 'other' and in the free text box, I say 'gender is a social construct. my sex is female'. Anything else, I tick 'prefer not to say'. It didn't stop me getting my current job :-)

This is not true of all online application systems, BBC Careers for example does not let you skip or 'prefer not to say' some questions.

I didn't say anything about being allowed to skip questions? I said the data was not kept together with the application form. And the question was "Is Equal Opportunities data visible TO YOU?" In our organisation, and this should be the case everywhere, it isn't. In fact, when I do a sift, I don't even get a name, just a candidate number and a form with any identifying information redacted. I don't work for the BBC so I can't say for definite what they do. Keeping them together would leave them wide open to a discrimination case.

Fair enough and apologies but some PPs said just put 'Prefer Not To Say' when in fact there are not always options for that. I don't want to give my data (anonymised or not) when filling this out. I have never seen any evidence or research that says collecting personal data works to create equality and equity.

About 0.5% of the population are trans so you'd probably expect 1 in 200 applicants to be trans and 1 in 200 employees to be trans. If it's not, you might want to have a rough idea of why that is the case.

Anyone at any point can self-declare as having a trans identity so we don't actually know what proportion applicants is representative of the population. Not to mention that the 0.5% figure is also unreliable even as a snapshot in time - the questions were misleading and likely to have yielded an inflated figure in areas especially where people for whom English is not the first language live.