Our gender-neutral users
I came across the term “Gender-Fluid” for the first time while reading a book meant for young-adults written by Rick Riordan, an author whose books I’ve been reading since I was younger than a young adult. After googling the term for a while, I finally understood that gender-fluid people don’t identify with a single gender. There as days when they identify as a certain gender, and then there are days when they identify with another. I assume that the people around them accommodate their gender-of-the-day into their vocabulary if they are nice enough.
So, when there are real people in the world who like to be referred to as ‘he’ on some days and ‘she’ on others, why does our user always end up being referred to as ‘HE’?
While speaking with a product owner very recently about the user journey, I caught myself referring to the user as if they were male. A user whose persona hadn’t even been defined by me had somehow become male in my head, and thus my vocabulary. I realized that I’ve been doing this since the beginning of time.
Even when user personas get created at the very beginning of our design processes, and are clearly defined as female, designers end up referring to the user in question as if they were male. In an era where BEYONCE herself is declaring that girls run the world, why is my first instinct to declare my user a male?
While I understand that us designers need to make a lot of assumptions while creating experiences for our end-users, I believe that gender is something that can be left un-assumed.
What can we do?
The most basic solution to this is to user Gender-Neutral language. As complex as it sounds, it is fairly simple. The only thing we’d need to do is swap the word ‘he’ with ‘they’. Some people might even be more comfortable using ‘he or she’ when referring to their user. Since that seems a mouthful, ‘they’ feels like a better alternative.
When we use the term ‘they’ for our users, we imply that since we don’t know their gender, we are using a gender-neutral pronoun. The user could be male, as we usually imagine, but we are not stating that. And by simply not stating that, we are being more inclusive.
Even though ‘they’ is traditionally a plural pronoun, using it to refer to a third person is acceptable.
To include more gender-neutral language in your vocabulary, you could read its Wikipedia article.
Us designers often talk about being able to empathise with the users as one of our prime fortes. We become the spokespersons for our end users and customers. I believe that to represent them right, the least we could do is not assume their genders.
What is the big deal?
There is no big deal. At all. This is not something that is or will ever be a mandate. But neither is making personas, or chalking out user journeys. There are some things we do just to be able to understand our user better, to be able to walk a mile in their shoes and only then make decisions on their behalf.
All this does is make us more inclusive. By referring to a user as ‘he or she’/’them’ instead of ‘he’, we are announcing to the world that we understand that there are people of various genders that we acknowledge, and eventually design for. Inclusivity is an aspect of humanity and empathy, which when we imbibe, will we become the designers(/humans) we strive and hope to be.
So catch yourself from using a certain pronoun the next time you are talking about your users and use ‘they’/’them’. Repeat the sentence and correct yourself if needed. It took me a lot of time to modify my vocabulary to make my users gender-neutral, and I still slip very often. But using the correct language is something I believe will allow us to not just be inclusive, but also perceive them in a way we might have missed before!
