How to Be an Ally This Pride Month (and Year-Round): Share Your Pronouns

🌈 Happy Pride Month! 🌈 Time to change your profile picture and Zoom background and wear all your rainbow accessories! That’s all you have to do to be an ally to LGBTQIA+ people, right?

Wrong. Allyship isn’t just about what you wear or what you post on social media. It’s about showing respect and empathy for your friends, family, and coworkers. And you know what’s a super simple—yet extremely impactful—way to respect and support trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people? Use their correct pronouns. Full stop. Even if it’s hard. Even if they are ones you haven’t seen before. Even if you trip up and have to correct yourself—you will, and it’s okay!

As a cisgender person (meaning that you identify with the gender you were assigned at birth), you can go a step further and normalize pronoun sharing. This is a great way to support trans, gender non-conforming, and non-binary folks by making your environment more inclusive.

In meetings, include your pronouns when you introduce yourself. For example, I’d say “Hi, I’m Amy Goldfine, I’m the founder of MarketingOpsAdvice.com, and my pronouns are she/her.” You should also take a few minutes to add your pronouns on your social and business profiles. Here is a guide to adding your pronouns to common business apps and social media platforms.

Slack

1. Click on your profile photo/icon in the top right
2. Select Edit Profile
3. Add your pronouns to the Pronouns field
4. Click Save Changes

Learn more in this Help Article

Zoom

1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal at https://zoom.us/signin (or via your company’s single signon dashboard)
2. In the navigation panel, click Profile.
3. On the right side of your name, click Edit.
4. In the Pronouns field, enter your pronouns.
5. In the How would you like to share your pronouns? drop-down field, choose from the following options:
   1. Always share in meetings and webinars: Your pronouns will appear next to your display name automatically in any meetings that you host or join, and any webinars that you’re the host or panelist for.
   2. Ask me every time after joining meetings and webinars: You will be asked if you want your pronouns to appear next to your display name in every meeting that you host or join, and any webinars that you’re the host or panelist for.
   3. Do not share in meetings and webinars: Your pronouns will not appear next to your display name in any meetings or webinars. You will have to manually choose to share your pronouns.
      Note: Even if you choose not to share your pronouns in meetings or webinars, your pronouns will still appear in your profile card and be visible to your Zoom contacts if you have entered them in the Pronouns field.
6. Click Save.

Learn more at this help article. Note: If you don’t see the option to change your Zoom pronouns, your company’s admins may not have turned on the feature. Find the person or team that owns Zoom at your company and encourage them to enable it.

Other Web Conferencing Tools

Unfortunately, other tools such as Teams, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting don’t appear to have pronoun features. Your best bet is to edit your profile name so that your pronouns are at the end, e.g. “Amy Goldfine (she/her)”. (If there are official ways to add your pronouns in other tools, let me know in the comments!)

LinkedIn

1. On the right side of the top nav, click your profile photo and choose View Profile
2. Click the pen icon to edit
3. Add your pronouns to the Pronouns field, and choose who you want to be able to see your pronouns
4. Click Save

Twitter

Although there were rumors that Twitter was going to add a pronoun field, they don’t seem to have materialized. The best workaround is to add your pronouns to the end of your bio.

Email Signature

This is going to vary depending on how locked down your corporate email signature is. If it’s not managed by your company, then you can edit it directly. In Gmail, go into Settings > See all settings > scroll to the signature section. In Outlook…honestly there are so many different versions of Outlook, I suggest you Google “Email signature Outlook [version]” and follow the instructions you find there!

If your company uses an email signature management platform such as Terminus Email Experiences or WiseStamp, there may already be a pronoun field in your signature template. In that case, you can log in and edit your profile. If there’s no pronoun field, Pride Month is a great time to encourage the your company’s admin to add one. (Want to know a secret? I manage my company’s signature tool, and I just went ahead and added the pronoun field. Nobody batted an eyelash, and I have heard from trans coworkers that they really appreciated it.)

Asana

1. Click your avatar in the top right corner of Asana
2. Click My Profile Settings in the drop-down menu
3. Type your pronouns into the field beneath Department in the pop-up dialog.
   Now any time someone hovers over your avatar, your pronouns will show up on your profile card.

How are you showing up as an ally to your coworkers? And did I miss any common platforms that allow pronoun sharing? Let me know in the comments. Also I’d love to hear from LGBTQIA+ people if you have any feedback on this post, good or bad. Please leave a comment, or DM me on LinkedIn or Slack if you’d rather share privately.