A Developer's Guide to Asking for Pronouns

Hi friends!

I'm Sarah. I'm a front end web developer at Lumastic, I use she/her pronouns, and today I'm taking over the blog from Drew to talk about the implementation of pronouns on apps!

This came up recently at Lumastic because we're revamping the site and inclusivity is a big goal of ours. I'm currently adding in a pronouns field to our user profile settings and had a lot of questions as to how to best do that. Unfortunately, I haven't seen a lot of discussion in developer communities about the implementation of pronoun selectors in apps, so today I want to share with you what I've learned so far!

Let's start with the basics.

What are pronouns?

Grammatically, a pronoun is a replacement for the proper name of a person or thing being discussed in a sentence. In English, we traditionally use words like 'it' or 'this' as a pronoun for non-humans ("Can you pass me the spoon? It's in that drawer") and gendered pronouns like 'she' or 'he' to refer to people ("Liza's busy working on her thesis. Can she call you back later?").

Forcing the speaker to choose between 'he' or 'she' as a replacement for a person's name indicates that English speakers have traditionally categorized humans as either male or female. There is no default third option built into our language for those who don't strongly identify as either gender or cases where a person's gender is unknown by the speaker.

However, we can choose to use other pronouns that more accurately capture our gender expressions. Some examples of alternative pronouns include 'they/them/theirs' and 've/ver/vis,' but there are a wide range of pronouns used by English speakers.

When someone has identified pronouns that better suit them, it's important to call that person by their chosen pronouns. Correctly using someone's pronouns validates their gender expression and shows that you care to see them as they want to be seen. This is true both in real life and online.

The developer's role

As developers, we have the opportunity to shape the cultures of the apps that we create. Ask any UX/UI specialist and they'll tell you that our choices have a profound impact on the feelings that people get from our sites.

I believe strongly that we should be developing with empathy for our users. If you want the people experiencing your end product to feel like your app is a place for them, you have to choose to be inclusive at every opportunity. That includes race, age, sexuality, ability, body shape, and gender.

It's our responsibility to ensure that users aren't discriminated against by our apps. Therefore, we have to think through the implications of the features that we create and sometimes decide whether or not it's actually beneficial to our users for us to ask for information like gender and pronouns.

When to ask for gender & pronouns

Most apps aren't going to need user gender or pronouns in order to function. In general, if your app can be genderless, it should be. By not asking for gender, you can prevent sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination on your app and avoid othering nonbinary or questioning users.

However, it won't always be possible to keep an app genderless. Dating apps are the most obvious example of an actual use case for gender definition of some sort, as some people are only attracted to one gender. For a dating app to be effective at delivering suitable partners, it needs to be able to algorithmically match gender preferences of two users to see if they would be compatible.

Some sites might not require gender for their algorithm but could still benefit from some sort of definition of pronouns. Lumastic, for example, is a workplace productivity tool. Gender shouldn't matter in the workplace. The opportunity to share your pronouns, however, is important in an environment where people will be talking to and about team members. For that reason, we decided to include pronouns as an optional profile field for users who want to designate them.

How to ask for gender & pronouns

After we decided to include pronouns on user profiles, it was time to design the settings page. I started off with a simple text input but almost immediately got stuck on the placeholder text to include. There were two groups to keep in mind here: people who don't use 'she/her' or 'he/his' pronouns and people who are unfamiliar with the concept of pronouns entirely. I wanted to provide enough guidance that people could figure out what we were asking them to input without binding those who were already familiar with the concept to traditional binary options. So, I tried to turn to the experts.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to have been widely written about from the developers' perspective. The closest that I could find was this article from Google that covers pronoun use in documentation. It's interesting to note that Google recommends for us to default to a gender-neutral 'they' when gender is unknown instead of hacking punctuation to combine traditional binary pronouns with '(s)he' or 'he/she', but their article didn't answer my question of what the heck to put as a placeholder when asking someone to supply their pronouns.

Next up, I tried to find examples of sites that ask for user pronouns in hopes that I would find a phrase that I could emulate on Lumastic. Instead, I stumbled upon this article from nonbinary wiki that lists sites that ask for pronouns and categorizes those sites by how inclusive they are in their input options. I learned here that I was right to use a text input instead of a selector: according to the article, it's preferable to allow users to write in their own gender & pronouns instead of forcing them to choose.

Allowing users to write in their own gender & pronouns instead of selecting from a menu puts the power in the user's hands to choose the words that mean most to them, rather than being limited to the options that the developers can think of.

Selector use for pronouns is still acceptable, though, as long as one of the options opens up a text input that can be used to write in an option that was not available in the selector. If you anticipate that a large portion of your users might be unfamiliar with pronouns, I recommend going this route, as it provides more guidance to those users while still allowing more knowledgable users to do their own thing.

Keep gender & pronouns optional

I also learned from the nonbinary wiki article that it's important for gender & pronoun fields to be optional. Not everyone has landed on their perfect pronouns yet, and some people might not want to share their pronouns even if they know them. By keeping gender & pronouns optional, you're not forcing anyone to choose their identity for your app.

What we're doing at Lumastic

For now, we've landed on a text input in the user settings for pronouns, and we're not asking for the user's gender. The placeholder text in the pronoun field is "e.g., they/them, she/her, he/him."

I chose those pronoun pairs because they're the ones that I see most frequently so will hopefully be recognizable to users who are unfamiliar with pronouns, and I chose to put them in that order to normalize the choice of the less commonly used 'they/them' and subvert expectations of male as a default.

In summary

Your app probably doesn't need to ask users for their gender or pronouns. If it does, ask for gender/pronouns with a text input or a selector that includes a custom option in which users can still use a text input to add their own value. Make sure that gender and pronouns are optional fields.

Also, I would like to put some gratitude into the universe for the authors of the nonbinary wiki article that I referenced repeatedly. I'm sure developers were not their target audience, but the insight that they gave me will allow me to make this corner of the internet a little more inclusive!

Thanks for taking the time to read. I'd love to hear your thoughts - you can find me at sarah@lumastic.com.

Until next time!