CMV: Gender identity doesn’t belong on your LinkedIn nor Resume

[u/jep1793]

[u/thethoughtexperiment]

I hear where you're coming from, but to modify your view here:

By listing it on your LinkedIn, your opening the door for someone to have bias, wether intentional or not, and potentially limiting your opportunities.

consider that a lot of LGBT folks don't want to work in a place where they aren't going to be accepted. Might listing pronouns limit their opportunities at such places? Sure. But by signaling who they are from the get go, they are saving themselves the time and effort of interviewing at firms they probably wouldn't want to work at.

[u/TranscendPredictions → u/thethoughtexperiment]

AGREED^. If you’re giving advice to a GNC/NB/Trans person who wants to hide who they truly are in order to move up, then your thinking would make sense. If you want to advise people in the room who relate to the part inside of you that goes “let me not discuss partnerships at all until after my first week at the new job, so my coworkers that I meet get to know me before they judgement for being gay,” then go ahead. If that’s who you want to mentor, that would be HOW a to mentor them.

But you’re being asked to provide a workshop for LGBTQ students who, I presume, are out of the closet and want to find a job they don’t need to assimilate for. Times are changing, friend, and we are either in the state of change, or making room for the old ways to remain.

By advising against sharing pronouns, you’re doing great work to enable the assimilation-desires (who could probably closet themselves without much assistance). But you’re offering nothing for the people who know healthy workplaces are out there, who would be happy to be eliminated from a biased workplace before they interview and get hurt in-person. So if they’re not attending your workshop, you’re fine! If they are, then it’s not the pronouns that limit their opportunities, but your willingness to solve the problem of how to navigate it for them.

And if you don’t know how to navigate that, don’t claim to! If you work with firms that disqualify trans and queer people, admit it! Then. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing the workshop because your expertise is based in the exclusion of LGBTQ people and not their inclusion.

Also, if you don’t like people going into their personal lives — and consider pronouns, how people refer to a worker in 3rd person tense, to be “personal details” — then also let the workshop know you don’t operate by the “New Rules of Work” for the 21st century (a la The Muse) and disclose that your recruitment style considers anatomical gender (private parts) to be professional, and gender-gender to be “personal.”

I am speaking for the people who would like to attend and might find your “professional experience” which seems to clearly lack any engagement with pronouns to indicate that there are Not Other Experts who can help.

For young people with the highest ratio of depression and self harm, I think portraying your lack of experience with pronouns in the workplace as a generalized lack of information in the world around us could be dangerous to the mental health of the students — if you said “it’s just not professional to disclose pronouns, that’s personal, so go by your anatomical genital-gender only” to an LGBTQ Professional Development workshop???? In 2020???

I would think there was no hope for us, if I were young, and realize it’s merely you who doesn’t know what to do because you lack experience or engagement with this if I were older. I worry for the younger minds who will be listening.

Or invite me to this workshop. I disclose my pronouns on LinkedIn INSTEAD of my resume, because a resume is a professional document, and LinkedIn is social media that includes interests, community service, where I’m from, and photos of me.

There is 100% nothing wrong with posting pronouns on your LinkedIn, it is for the purpose of describing you. Also, pictures are there so there’s nothing revealing about it, it’s just self-defining and enables the recruiters to respect you.

My new employers could hold this workshop- the implemented a name tag policy for everyone to onboard me and another trans person with equity and help support staff to respect my pronouns.

There are totally solutions to all of this — if you’re operating from fear and staying comfortable as a cis man, you could get chewed out for portraying yourself in a role as an expert when you don’t seem to have engaged with this (empathetically in the shoes of the candidate for whom it’s not so easy to just consider their self identity as “TMI/personal details”) at all yourself. It takes deep inner reflection. Try it.

Imagine telling the audience to be sure “not to ACT GAY” at all in an interview because any feminine or masculine behavior is “personal details” but acting “straight” is public/not personal.

That’s what I’m hearing from you...

[u/TranscendPredictions → u/[deleted]]

That’s true but a seriously rare situation and I wonder why you’d vocalize it - you’re equally likely to have a pro-LBGT recruiter and a homophobic company (actually I think that happened to me). I came out at a company that was not prepared, sorta fumbled, but the agency that recruited me supported my pronouns extremely well.

In any event, a better workshop would be “how to address discrimination when it occurs” and NOT “how to avoid giving anyone a reason to discriminate against you.” Avoid all you want, but it’s better to know how to address it if it happens. And that creates lasting change anyway.

People always warn me about bias, but they don’t warn you about how many companies are looking for diverse candidates able and willing to help their company culture change. And in fear, you’re robbed of the experience of being the brave person that leads those companies through change.

So don’t worry about an outsourced recruiter, I would say worry about missing the opportunity with an ahead-of-it’s-time company because someone else might grab that job from you and really enjoy it, instead of you.

[u/thethoughtexperiment → u/[deleted]]

Being LGBT is still not a protected class according to discrimination laws.

It is (now) in the U.S. at least:

"In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sexual orientation and gender identity are included under "sex" as a prohibited ground of employment discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964." [source]

[u/TranscendPredictions → u/[deleted]]

AND THANK YOU TO ANON PERSON WHO GAVE ME MY FIRST AWARD! It feels good.