The awkwardness of masculine or feminine appellatives

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Making the text of interfaces and other communications gender neutral is a bit more difficult in Spanish than in English, for the simple reason that interfaces usually speak in the second person (tú/usted), and unlike English - where gender is not implied in the second person - in Spanish it is constantly implied in adjectives. And it happens that adjectives are frequently used in interfaces to communicate status ("confirmed", "connected", "registered", etc.).

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Creating gender-neutral interfaces and communications does not mean merely not assuming that our user is male. Even if we know the gender of our user, there are a huge number of people of non-binary genders who are not comfortable with male or female appellations (and to whom just asking for gender can be invasive). Avoiding assuming the user's gender ensures that anyone will feel correctly appealed to when interacting with our services.

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At Get on Board we are constantly questioning this. Here are a couple of tips that have helped us solve most of the pitfalls:

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Tip 1: Replacing adjectives with participles

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This is the simplest tip. In the male form they look the same but they are not:

• ❌ You have been hired (not neutral) → ✅ You have been hired (neutral).
• ❌ You are invited (not neutral) → ✅ We invited you (neutral).

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Tip 2: Move the subject so that it is not the user.

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When it is not possible to avoid the adjective, we can move the subject of the sentence so that instead of being the user, it is something that belongs to the user (and can be of any gender), such as his session, his account, his invitation, and so on:

• ❌ You are offline (not neutral) → ✅ Your session has been disconnected (neutral).
• ❌ You were already registered with this email (not neutral) → ✅ Your account was already registered with this email (neutral).
• ❌ Enrolled (not neutral) → ✅ Confirmed enrollment(neutral)

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Additionally, this helps communication to be less aggressive and personal when it comes to communicating problems or bad news:

• ❌ You are late with your payment (not neutral) → ✅ Your payment is late (neutral).
• ❌ You have been rejected by the company (not neutral) → ✅ Your application has been rejected by the company (neutral).

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This advice also helps to improve neutrality when the UI needs to refer to third parties, whose gender should also not be assumed - for example, when managing team members - . Speaking of "user" is often an imperfect solution and leads to awkward expressions ("User Maria Gomez is confirmed"). In these cases, moving the subject also helps:

• ❌ User maria@example.com has been invited (not neutral)→ ✅ An invitation has been sent to maria@example.com (neutral).
• ❌ María Gómez is inactive (not neutral) → ✅ María Gómez's account is inactive (neutral).

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Tip 3: Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing subjects and mentioning them as "person" never fails:

• ❌ All recipients of this mail (non-neutral) → ✅ All persons who will receive this mail (neutral).
• ❌ The account owner (not neutral) → ✅ The person who owns the account (neutral).
• ❌ C itizens(not neutral) → ✅ Persons with citizenship (neutral).

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Using relative pronouns (who, whom) is also an elegant way to turn sentences into neutral when there is an implied action:

• ❌ The participant of the meeting (not neutral) → ✅ Who participates in the meeting (neutral).
• ❌ S ubscribers (not neutral) → ✅ Those who subscribe (neutral).
• ❌ The driver of the vehicle (not neutral) → ✅ Whoever drives the vehicle (neutral).

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Many adjectives can be easily paraphrased:

• ❌ Connected (not neutral) → ✅ On line (neutral).
• ❌ Inactive (non-neutral) → ✅ No activity(neutral)
• ❌ You are subscribed to this newsletter (not neutral) → ✅ You have requested to receive this newsletter, or Your subscription to this newsletter is active (neutral)

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In confirmation dialogs:

• ❌ Are you sure you want to... (not neutral) → ✅ Do you really want to... (neutral).

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Another option in the confirmation dialogs is to simply skip them and offer the option to undo 😉.

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Tip 4: Evade

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There are some cases where the gender implicature is very difficult to avoid, such as when trying to describe roles. For example, if I take "Mary is now a teacher (non-neutral)" and try to change it to "Mary now has a role as a teacher", even though it sounds more neutral it is still not really neutral, since "role" is transitive and the subject is still Mary. In situations like this there are some alternatives:
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1. Bypass the mention altogether ("Mary's role has been changed correctly"), which saves the sentence but, of course, maintains the gender implication elsewhere in the interface where "teacher" is mentioned;
2. Look for gender-neutral role names, which works in some contexts, such as going from "Pupil" (non-neutral) to "Student" (neutral).
3. Convert to proper noun and shamelessly distort or translate. If it is a proper name, we can really do whatever we want. The role could be called "Teacher", for example (and in these cases I prefer gender neutrality to idiomatic integrity). In the case of "Administrator", for example, shortening it to "Admin" is totally popularized and allows you to make it neutral. You can even use it as a branding opportunity (instead of "the delivery guy", you can talk about your "Delivery Wizard" or whatever you can think of).

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When testing with users... sorry, with those who use your product, try to involve people of different genders and explicitly ask them to tell you if they detect parts of the interface where a different gender than their own is assumed.

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This article originally appeared on the Get On Board blog.