Reconsider adding pronouns field

[kindrowboat]

Hello 👋🏻

I'd like to ask the maintainers to reconsider including a pronouns field in the JSON resume schema. Past issues and PRs have been closed because including pronouns wasn't standard. I believe that has changed in the past couple of years. LinkedIn, Zoom, Slack, Workday, Discord, GitLab, Stack Overflow, Greenhouse, Monster, and many other professional online services allow users to indicate their personal pronouns. Most of these services have the pronoun field as an optional free-form string and, if supplied, append it in parentheses after the users name, e.g. "Stef Dunlap (she/her)".

It's also been brought up that including pronouns in the spec is political or that it adds noise. However, indicating pronouns helps clear up confusion before it starts, and is thus much more signal than noise. For instance, if I apply to a job, and someone assumes by my name--Stef which is rather androgynous--that I use he/him pronouns and addresses me as such in an e-mail or interview, I'm then placed in the awkward position of correcting my potential employer. If you don't think this is a big deal, you may have never interviewed as a woman trying carefully to not get labeled as "bossy" or "not a team player."

Asking users to include their pronouns in their description is a sub-optimal solution. One point of JSON resume schema, as I understand it, is to be machine an human readable. Putting pronouns in a generic "description" field is neither machine nor human readable, and can come across as "political", "bossy", "being difficult," when really, we just want to avoid correcting people in our interviews/onboarding.

Like all fields in JSON resume schema, this field would be optional. Users of the schema and theme maintainers would be free to use or disregard the field, but the invitation would be there for all users to include their personal pronouns.

[adenner]

Would it make sense to merge this with #451 and create a more flexible "optional" yet standardized set of fields?

[jasonpatrickellykrause]

@adenner I would say no.

#451 is related to optional employment disclosures, and pronouns are not related in my mind.

[thomasdavis]

There is not enough demand for this throughout the ecosystem, there is a meta property where arbitrary fields can be inserted, if and when the popularity of a pronouns meta field has the semblance of a majority amongst theme developers (and those who implement their own hosted versions) we can we revisit if it goes into the schema.