Five simple ways to make your marketing more gender inclusive

Using gender-inclusive language is about ensuring that all groups feel included in your marketing copy. At best, language that isn’t gender inclusive can make people feel uncomfortable and, at worst, it can completely alienate an entire community. The good news is that English has many options for ensuring gender inclusion. So why not use them in your texts?

In some languages, such as French or German, gender-inclusive language is not as standardised. Their somewhat binary grammatical structures have stilted progress so far. Therefore, translators should be wary about transferring the grammatical structures of the original text when they’re translating into English. It’s important for your translator to actively engage with the text and to consciously think about the language they're using. They should commit to using gender-inclusive phrasing to ensure that your materials don't exclude anyone.

If people feel excluded, it can give them a bad first impression of your company, even if you have a great product to offer them. You'll never truly know how many people left your website because they didn’t feel seen by your brand. In the longer term, you can work with your translator to build a style guide, so that your marketing communications are consistent and inclusive. In the meantime, there are some simple things that you can do immediately to make your translations that bit more accessible. In the best-case scenario, the language used will be so inclusive that no-one will even notice, leaving them to focus on your wonderful products and services instead!

1. ‘They’

When translating from one language to another, it’s important for the translator to intensely engage with the source material so that they're accurately conveying the messages you want to share about your brand. However, they should also be confident enough to step back from it and ensure that the final text is not inhibited by the original language.

In many languages, sentences can be rephrased so that they don’t have a specific subject, or you can simply refer to the customer directly with ‘you’. In English, another option is using the plural ‘they’ when referring to a non-specific audience. ‘Our customers have been so impressed with our product that they have rated it the full five stars.’ While this may seem like an obvious choice, sometimes stilted versions using ‘he/she’ still slip through the net quite often when translators stick too close to the original.

2. Rewrite a sentence rather than using a gendered noun

While it's much more gender neutral than many other European languages, English still does use some gendered nouns, for example when referring to jobs. Rather than copying the terms ‘policemen and women’ or ‘business men and women’ from the original language, making use of the English terms ‘police officers’ and ‘business people’ can immediately make a text much more gender inclusive.

In other languages too, gendered nouns can be avoided by referring to people in the plural. Rather than addressing jeder Besucher/jede Besucherin’ (every female visitor/ every male visitor) who came to your event, you could formulate it another way, such as ‘Danke an alle, die uns besucht haben' (thanks to everyone who visited), to make it more inclusive.

3. Don’t use titles

It used to be common to refer to customers as 'Dear Sir or Madam' or 'Dear Mr/Mrs …' in communications. Nowadays, there’s no need to include people’s titles in e-mails and communications, especially in English. The traditional forms exclude people who don't identify with either of those titles. Why not just use their full name? Or, if your communications have a more informal style, just their first name will suffice. Even people who do identify as a Mr or Mrs may prefer the more personal approach.

4. Create a note on gender-inclusive language on your website

Having your website translated into different languages is a must if you want to market your brand abroad. As mentioned above, some European languages have gendered nouns and can pose challenges for gender inclusion. If you have made particular translation decisions based on your style guide, include a note about them on your website, explaining why you made those decisions. This shows your potential customers that you are conscious of gender inclusion and the challenges that some languages, such as German, pose.

5. Ensure that your translator cares about gender inclusion

To implement all of the above points, it’s crucial that your translator is conscious of the language they’re using and is bold enough to move away from the original text as required. Therefore, it’s important to find a translator who genuinely cares about inclusion and wants to work with you to make your brand more approachable. They also need to keep up with researching the best language to use. Gender inclusion is not about seeming like you’re doing the right thing: it’s about striving for everyone to feel heard and represented, regardless of their gender identity. I can work with you to ensure that your translations reflect that, not just in one text, but every single time.