How to speak inclusive English

You are talking about your job and explaining client meetings. So far so good. You say, “When you have a meeting with your client, you might have lunch with him.”

😖 What’s wrong with this?

Why indeed. Let me ask you a question: are all your clients only men?

In French it’s easy: it’s le client when you’re talking about clients in general, so you use masculine pronouns. English doesn’t have gendered nouns, so when you are talking about a person and you cannot specify if this person is male or female, you need to choose a neutral pronoun, so as not to imply that everyone in that category is male.

The neutral pronoun in English is they, even if you are only talking about one person! You can also say he or she but it’s a mouthful to repeat that every time.

For a long time, it was correct to use he in English in a sentence like “A good boss knows his employees well” but this has become outdated and sexist. Using they as a singular pronoun, was also seen as ungrammatical and therefore wrong, but in fact it was commonly used this way back in the time of Shakespeare. It was only in the 20th century that it came to be regarded as wrong.

Nowadays, it’s commonly used and not seen as grammatically incorrect. Marking guidelines for students in the US and the UK have been updated in the last few years to follow this rule, and students will not be marked as incorrect for using they for one person.

The Purdue university Owl website, which is a fantastic resource for writing, has an article that goes into more depth that you can read here.

There is some other vocabulary you need to be aware of if you want to be sure your English is inclusive. First of all, be careful not to use only male or female words for specific jobs. Instead of air hostess, use flight attendant. Replace fireman with firefighter, policeman with police officer. And the chairman of a meeting should be the chairperson (unless you know who it is and then you can specify chairman or chairwoman.)

It’s also important that you know how to talk about different groups of people: for example, in French, you can talk about personnes handicapés, but in English you should talk about people with disabilities. There are many other examples, that are constantly evolving. If it’s something that you will have to talk about or write about in your job, keep yourself updated.

If you’d like to know more, you can download a recent list I made here or you can have a look at Buzzfeed’s excellent style guide.