Language and Inclusion

1. How We Write About People

English settles most of this through word choice rather than typography, so that is where we do the work.

We use role and function names that are already neutral: founder, chair, spokesperson, the leadership team, the board, the workforce. Not chairman, not salesman, not manpower. Where a person’s gender is unknown or beside the point, we use singular they, and where they would read awkwardly we rebuild the sentence so no pronoun is needed at all: “send it to the person handling the account” rather than “send it to his or her account manager”. We keep “he or she” for the rare case where the gender of specific people actually carries the meaning.

When we write about real people we name them as they are: the founders and co-founders we work with, the women and men who run the businesses we advise. And we watch the generics that slip in unnoticed, the ones nobody intends: “guys” for a mixed room, man-hours, mankind.

Every role, title and description of a person on this website applies equally to people of all genders, without exception and without a hierarchy between them.

2. Why the Four Language Versions Read Differently

This website is published in English, German, French and Japanese, and the question looks different in each of them. English almost never carries grammatical gender in a word for a person, so a neutral vocabulary plus a rebuilt sentence covers nearly every case.

German and French carry grammatical gender in nearly every noun for a person. The choice there is between naming both forms every time, inserting a typographic marker inside the word (the gender star, the gender colon, the point médian), or writing around it. On our German and French pages we write around it: both forms where that reads naturally, a collective term or the role where it would not, and no special characters inside a word. Those markers are read very differently across our markets, screen readers handle them inconsistently, and they do not transfer between our four languages in any reliable way.

One commitment, three grammars, three solutions. In each case the decision is about how a sentence reads. It is not a statement about who belongs here.

3. Equality and Diversity Matter to Us

Equal treatment is not settled by spelling. It is settled by who gets hired, who is heard in a meeting, who stands on the stage at our meetups, and who is invited into a client conversation. Those are the places we hold ourselves to, and we are glad to be measured there.

We hold language to the same standard: it should include people rather than perform inclusion. Diversity and equal opportunity are part of how we work, not a paragraph kept aside for a page like this one.

4. Found a Sentence That Does Not Fit?

Language moves, and the odd formulation gets past us. If a passage on this website excludes someone, reads badly, or is simply wrong, please tell us. Name the page and the sentence if you can.

Write to us through the contact form.

We read every message, we reply, and we correct what needs correcting.