While interviewing for a job with a popular car maker during an engineering career conference last year in Houston, J. Murphy*, 22, wore a pin displaying their pronouns, which are they/them. When the two men who interviewed Murphy got their pronouns wrong, Murphy, who is nonbinary, corrected them.
“They just did not acknowledge it,” Murphy says, “and even seemed uncomfortable.”
The rest of the interview didn’t get much better. When Murphy, who requested a pseudonym to protect their identity, asked about how the company works to promote inclusivity and equity, they say, the interviewers gave a “bland, nothing answer and were even a little tough: ‘we’re engineers, we don’t get involved in people’s personal identities.’”
Murphy had already interned at another car company for more than a year, and after chatting with other applicants at the conference, learned they were the only applicant with prior vehicle manufacturing experience. But in the end, they didn’t get the job. “Overall, [the interviewers] left me with the impression that I was too soft and sensitive for their line of work,” Murphy says.
This is not an uncommon experience for nonbinary job seekers. According to a recent Business.com survey of 409 U.S.-based nonbinary adults, 80% said they “believed that identifying as nonbinary would hurt their job search.” In a test looking into this belief, Business.com sent out two fabricated entry-level résumés to 180 employers across a variety of industries. Both featured a gender ambiguous name (Taylor), and half included a mention of they/them pronouns while the other half did not include any reference to pronouns. The résumés all met each job’s qualifications, but the ones that included pronouns got 8% less interest from employers.
Though there’s no robust research measuring reactions to nonbinary folks’ résumés, the bias reflected in Business.com’s test is noticed widely in the world of hiring, among both nonbinary job seekers, and those involved in the hiring process. “For people who are nonbinary, it’s really, really challenging because they think the application and interview process is biased—and they’re right,” says Jeff Sipe, who runs the YouTube channel Practice Interviews and has 15 years of recruiting experience, five of which he spent at Google. “There’s unconscious bias that will leak into every facet of the hiring process.”
For nonbinary applicants, this can mean not only a greater likelihood of rejection, but an (often accurate) perception of unwelcomeness that prevents nonbinary job seekers from even applying to certain opportunities.
Challenges facing nonbinary applicants
Many nonbinary job seekers have extra considerations throughout the job search process. Kris Atienza, 29, has been putting their pronouns (they/them) on their résumé since 2019 and says that “it’s mostly food service-related industries that don’t ghost me.”
Atienza attributes this to a high proportion of LGBTQ people working in the food industry in the Boston area, where they live—“a safety in numbers type situation”—and is more hesitant to apply to jobs where they assume the highest positions of power will be held by “old white men,” which includes a lot of industries in the U.S.
Another place where bias can enter the hiring process is in gendered dress codes. Many companies have distinct dress codes for male versus female employees, which can be alienating for nonbinary applicants showing up to interviews.
Atienza, who’s been applying to jobs since January and got let go from their last restaurant job in March, is also limiting their search to their state because of publicly growing anti-trans sentiment and laws in other parts of the country. “I would have been more open to moving, but now I feel like [I’m in] one of the safer places to be,” they say.
Complications with job applications can also arise for nonbinary folks whose names differ from those they were given at birth, particularly when it comes to background checks—part of the hiring process for government jobs and those that involve working with children, for example.
“I had a job offer and it took three weeks to confirm because when I applied for a background check, it kept bouncing [or] coming up invalid,” says R*, “despite having changed my name and social security over five years ago.” R, who also requested a pseudonym, got the job, but the process forced them to out themselves and provide their deadname to their new colleagues.
How hiring managers can do better
Overall, however, job seekers and hirers who spoke with Fast Company say discussing pronouns during the hiring process has become more prevalent over the past several years.
Jessica Hardeman, Global Director on Indeed’s Employee Lifecycle team, who has worked as a recruiter and hiring manager across industries including consulting, financial services, and tech since 2011, says she’s seen “a shift in not only people feeling more comfortable disclosing their gender identity and pronouns, but [in] people proactively asking for them” in the past decade. Sipe says he’s seen an increase in pronouns listed on résumés and LinkedIn in the past five years since he left Google.
But that doesn’t mean hiring managers are no longer swayed by biases. Those who rejected the résumé with they/them pronouns in the Business.com test gave reasons specifically citing the pronouns’ inclusion, like “the pronouns are off-putting and unnecessary” and “I find that personal pronouns are quite silly in a job situation.” Another, who said that the applicant “seems like a decent fit on paper,” added that he was “not interested in the drama that a person who thinks they are a ‘they/them’ brings with them.”
Ruth Carter, a lawyer who’s nonbinary and was asked to provide their input to the Business.com research, found these comments “pretty shocking.” “Unless the person coming in the door is somebody who brings in drama, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t included on the résumé . . . it’s not the nonbinary person who has the issue. It’s other people dealing with a nonbinary person.”
Carter offers some tips for hiring managers, such avoiding terms like “identify” as nonbinary (“It’s not a choice . . . I am nonbinary,” they say) and “preferred” pronouns (“I have a preference for Coke versus Pepsi . . . I don’t have preferred pronouns, I just have pronouns”). They also point out that hiring managers can include a nonbinary applicant’s pronouns when introducing them to others at the office.
Sipe suggests interviewers begin conversations with applicants by sharing their pronouns and asking for the applicant’s. But he acknowledges that the percentage of interviewers doing that currently “is probably .00001%.”
Besides résumés and interviews, other parts of job applications can touch on gender. “It is very common for job applications to have a drop-down to self-identify your gender,” says Hardeman, “though most still only offer two options: male or female,” which can create an “isolating experience” for nonbinary applicants. When there’s an additional option, it’s often labeled “other,” which Hardeman adds “can be equally troublesome since it is literally ‘othering’ those job seekers.” (A simple fix would be to make this a fill-in-the-blank option.)
With younger job seekers showing significant interest in working for companies or institutions that support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, it seems that hiring managers are going to have to adapt their practices if they want to attract these younger workers. In the meantime, however, nonbinary job seekers say they must continue to make compromises. Murphy, for one, is not out at their current company, and Atienza needs to prioritize getting an income over finding the perfect job.
“I’ve had enough people over the years say, ‘Hey, look, if they’re not going to even talk to you because you’re nonbinary, that’s not a place you want to [work] at anyway,’” says Atienza. “Sure, but I’m broke. . . . I’ve got to meet somewhere in the middle.”
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.
