Plenty of job applicants have had this experience: They fill out a job application, and at the end they’re asked to enter their demographic information. They select their race, disability status and veteran status. When they go to put in their gender, however, the drop-down offers just two options: male or female. For people who don’t identify as strictly male or female — an umbrella gender category called non-binary — choosing between two genders that don’t quite fit can be a particularly isolating experience.
Non-binary people comprise a rapidly growing share of the workplace. About 1.2 million adults now identify as non-binary, and almost all of them (76%) are under the age of 30. Yet many companies still fail to adequately recognize non-binary people as part of their hiring processes. Such omissions carry the risk of alienating a key group of workers, who might interpret a non-inclusive hiring form as a sign that a workplace won’t be a supportive environment for them.
“It’s a lot about the signals that you send holistically throughout the recruitment process,” says Katina Sawyer, an associate professor of management at the University of Arizona who has studied transgender inclusion in the workplace.
Follow these best practices to be more inclusive of non-binary job seekers as they move through the application process.
Build an Inclusive Job Application
In order to show non-binary applicants that your company is a safe space, hiring managers should be sure to use inclusive language in job applications. The application, after all, is a potential employee’s first touchpoint with your company, and for LGBTQ+ job seekers, it can serve as an important signal of what your workplace values.
“I think people under-emphasize the importance of the job ad or description and the language that’s being used,” says Jessica Hardeman, global director of employee lifecycle at Indeed. “There are easy things you can do that will attract more candidates.”
Some companies have simply chosen to add an “other” option to the gender section of their applications, an approach most experts recommend avoiding. “That word is actually not helpful, not supportive,” says Janine Yancey, founder and CEO of the inclusion-oriented employee training company Emtrain. Even if the idea of “other” is to include many different genders at once, “just as easily, somebody could read ‘other’ as, ‘Oh, great, I’m being othered.’”
Instead, offer male, female and non-binary as gender options. Yancey suggests offering a fill-in-the-blank option too.
Companies can also add a space for applicants to list their pronouns. If someone’s candidacy moves to the interview stage, knowing their pronouns might help avoid a situation where a recruiter or hiring manager accidentally misgenders them. That said, pronoun questions should always be optional. Some non-binary applicants might be nervous about sharing their identity early in the application process, for fear of bias.
Report Non-Binary Employees Correctly on Government Forms
Many employers have been slow to add a non-binary gender option to forms like applications and employee records because the forms they must submit to the federal government usually feature only binary gender options: male or female.
But that paradigm is starting to change, and official recognition of non-binary identity has become more common at the federal level. In April 2022, the U.S. government began issuing passports with an “X” marker for non-binary people. Unfortunately for HR managers, though, not every agency has made it so easy for non-binary people to identify themselves.
Each year, businesses with at least 100 employees must submit to the federal government an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer Information Report — EEO-1 for short — the language of which seeks to determine “the race/ethnicity, sex and job category” of employees at these companies. While the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) uses these reports to measure diversity in the workforce, the EEO-1 forms have a glaring omission: They do not have a non-binary gender option.
For companies that want to recognize employees who don’t identify as male or female, however, there is a workaround. In 2019, the EEOC began recommending that employers identify an employee as non-binary in the comment box at the bottom of the EEO-1 form. The EEOC asks that employers use the phrase “Additional Employee Data” and then describe the employees they’re adding — for example, “Additional Employee Data: 1 non-binary gender employee,” followed by information about that employee’s job and their race/ethnicity.
The EEO-1 is the main federal form that medium-to-large companies need to fill out, but some states have supplemental forms, which tend to make it much easier to list workers as non-binary.
For instance, California asks employers to complete an annual Pay Data Report to help track pay discrimination. The Pay Data Report requires businesses to identify non-binary employees the same way they would men or women. In California, a sample identification might look like, “A30 - Hispanic/Latino - Non-Binary,” followed by that employee’s job and salary.
Focus on Other Aspects of Inclusion
While using inclusive language in job applications and employee records is a critical first step, a truly gender-inclusive hiring process takes into account the multifaceted ways in which trans identity might show up in the hiring process.
Recruiters and hiring managers should remain cognizant of names, for instance. Many trans and non-binary people use a name other than the one they were assigned at birth, and employers should be careful to use each candidate’s preferred name.
Likewise, when verifying an applicant’s background, keep in mind that their professional references or former bosses might know them by a different name. If a hiring manager does encounter a discrepancy between names, they should not assume the worst. “I’ve heard some horror stories about people being kind of thrown off in the process and then confronting candidates as though they were lying about their identity,” Sawyer says.
Rather than confronting the applicant on a discrepancy in names, hiring managers should be open to the fact that the information they encountered on, say, an old college transcript is likely to include a name assigned at birth that the applicant no longer recognizes (known as a deadname).
Training hiring managers and recruiters on the nuances of non-binary and trans identity is one way to ensure a more inclusive workplace — and so is holding accountable anyone at your company who might disrespect non-binary applicants.
If a recruiter is not sensitive to a person’s preferred pronouns, or uses a deadname even after being corrected, they risk alienating both qualified candidates and current employees. Thoughtful inclusion is critical for not only a company’s brand but for the humans who work there. And an inclusive mindset at a company inevitably trickles down to the hiring process.
Job applicants “look at your company pages, they look at the people that work at the company already, because they’re really thinking, can I see myself there?” says Kathryn Koo, a senior diversity, inclusion and belonging business partner at Indeed. “All of these things kind of come into play when they’re deciding to click submit — or not.”
