EQ for the IT Pro: Gender Pronouns in IT

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi. Thank you for joining us for this discussion on gender pronouns in IT. My name is CJ Gregorios and I used they/them pronouns. I am a passionate DEI advocate, the benefits senior advisor for the US team at Quest, and the Director of the Equality and Inclusion Council. With me today is Mike Weaver. It's good to be here. I'm a Microsoft MVP in the Microsoft Apps and Services category. I'm also a equality and inclusion advocate like CJ, and we're excited to bring this topic to you today. I also focus a lot on technology for merger, acquisitions, and divestitures in the Office 365 ecosystem. So let's talk about this topic of why we're here. Gender pronouns in IT is an interesting challenge because in a lot of cases, we're being asked to implement these systems without a lot of support. And a lot of us are getting in the technology problem and asked to implement it but not getting the support to do it. And a lot of our requests look like this, where we're having just the request to just turn it on. LinkedIn can do it, so why can't you? Make it available everywhere, but make employees do it, but don't screw it up. And that can be really stressful for us because these are sensitive topics. So what we're trying to do today is make it a little easier to navigate, give some tips and best practices on how to do it both from the people aspect, and then the technical aspects on how to do it as well. So we just introduced ourselves, and we included our pronouns because they articulate who we are in the outside world, and it affirms who we are and how we feel-- how we feel we are. Someone who identifies as mostly female would probably use she/her pronouns. And the common pronouns are she/her, he/him, or they/them. Sometimes if somebody is struggling or not struggling but exploring their gender, they can use either she/they or he/they. To clarify, gender pronouns are completely separate from sexual orientation. So just to expand a little bit on gender, the expression of gender is how we express ourselves externally. It's the different ways we express ourselves through our actions, our demeanor based on what we know of gender and how those are presented socially. Gender Identity is how we feel we are. Who we are in our heads, how we know ourselves to be based on those two genders that-- the options for gender that we know. And how much we either align or don't align with those options. It's really our psychological sense of gender. A majority of Americans now support gender inclusivity in the workplace. And that's not surprising because half of Americans now see gender on a spectrum. Those figures are expected to rise just because Millennials now represent the largest share of the US labor force. And that's a generation that's known for being open-minded, having inclusive values, and have the higher rates of LGBTQ+ Identity. Behind them-- and wait for this-- is Generation Z. So Generation Z is the next coming into the labor force, and they are poised to be the most diverse and gender-fluid generation yet. So pronoun use is embedded. It's embedded in everyday interactions, it's easy to take for granted how much we rely on signals and assumptions. So today, we're going to be talking about how to implement them in Office 365. Misgendering someone adds to a variety of challenges that they may have as they go through their gender identity process. And it can cause a range of difficulties, lowered self-esteem, some embarrassment. So having the options for gender-affirmative support can have a powerful, if not life saving, impact. But as technologists, we have some challenges. There's really not an amazing way to do this in our technical systems today, especially as we're talking about Office 365. As of the recording, we only have a couple of options on how to do it, and I think a lot of us will admit, they're not ideal. When we talk about the reason for picking the three options that I'm going to talk about today, it's all about control. And when you're going through this journey of determining how to implement this in your IT systems, it's about control for your user community and the comfort that they have. This is a big aspect when we were doing an implementation project together, was we heard very loud and clear from our employees that they wanted to be able to control who could see their pronouns that they'd selected. And I think what is really important to understand is, some people are comfortable sharing their preferred pronouns only with their direct work team, some are only comfortable with the entire internal company, and some are more comfortable with it being everywhere, they're at a point where that's happy being both internal and external. So it's important to understand when you're looking at these options, that you're getting feedback from your organization from people, holding feedback sessions so that people can understand how you want to implement it in your environment. And that's going to be company-by-company, person-by-person, and understanding that the environment that you're operating in and the countries that you operate in. So let's talk about the first option in system-- and I don't know if we call it a system, but it's the really easy way, and that's just doing it in Outlook signatures. And this has very different varieties. And a lot of times you'll pick some of the other options that we're talking about here, but people still use this in their outlook signature as well. And this is a really good entry point. A lot of people in your community and in your organization may be doing this already, but it's no cost, no change, you don't have to change any of your systems unless you're