What's in a pronoun: Exploring gender pronouns as an organizational identity-safety cue among sexual and gender minorities

Abstract Sexual and gender minorities face unwelcoming organizational environments, and may avoid workplace settings that fail to signal their support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) employees. Exposure to an identity-safety cue, or a signal that an organizational environment values LGBTQ+ employees, may attract sexual and gender minorities to organizational settings. Here, we report three experiments and an internal meta-analysis that examined whether the presence of an employee's gender pronouns (i.e., personal pronouns reflecting one's gender identity) in an employee biography, acts as an identity-safety cue for sexual and gender minorities. We found that relative to an employee biography with pronouns absent, the inclusion of gender pronouns resulted in more positive organizational attitudes among predominantly cisgender lesbian, gay, and bisexual participants (Experiment 1), as well as transgender and gender non-conforming participants (Experiments 2 & 3). Moreover, the inclusion of gender pronouns promoted positive organizational attitudes, regardless of whether the disclosure of pronouns was required or optional by the organization (Experiment 3). We also found evidence that the inclusion of pronouns signaled identity-safety via multiple aspects of the organizational environment. That is, the inclusion of pronouns also promoted perceptions the organization was procedurally fair for sexual and gender minorities (Experiment 2 & 3), as well as perceptions that employees and managers were allies for LGBTQ+ employees (Experiment 3); and, each of these perceptions positively related to organizational attitudes. The present experiments demonstrate that the inclusion of gender pronouns effectively signals identity-safety and encourages positive organizational attitudes among LGBTQ+ persons.