Times are changing and so is the English language. Language is a powerful tool of perception, but also for managing relationships through agreement.
Businesses utilise common, generic contracts for their transactions. These contracts often use pronouns such as ‘she/he’ and ‘his/her’ when addressing the parties. It is important for words in legal documents to be accurate, precise, but also to evolve with the changing times.
Traditionally, contracts and legal documents would only use masculine pronouns as only men owned property or conducted business. When women were part of a contractual agreement, masculine pronouns in the contract were interpreted as referring to female as well. This is clearly an outdated practice.
Modern business owners are encouraged to steer away from binary choices like ‘he’ and ‘she’, and instead adopt gender neutral language in their legal documents, like ‘they’ and ‘their’.
Not only may gendered language be perceived as biased against one or more genders, but assuming an individual’s gender in a contract, may offend your customer!
On a more practical level, gender-specific pronouns make a contract less versatile. Gender-specific contracts require more amendment, making them more difficult to work with.
Using only gender neutral pronouns avoids discriminatory or biased implications caused by referring to the sex of a party. Some individuals may not refer to themselves as ‘she’ or ‘he’.
Additionally, companies and other legal entities require gender neutral language. So being gender neutral addresses all kinds of ‘people’, even non-human ones.
Why should you use gender-neutral language in your contracts?
Most contracts are generic, and are used repeatedly with minimal editing. Employing gender-neutral terms minimises the amendments required when contracting with different types of entity, or people who self-identify differently from what is in the template.
Having to tailor each contract can be inconvenient and time-consuming just to respond to the particular gender of the person you are contracting with.
So why wouldn’t you want your legal documents to be versatile, require less editing and be automatically inclusive of all types of people?
Hot tip: An easy way to avoid gendered language is to define the relevant party at the start, using a gender-neutral term. For example in an employment agreement use the term “Employee” throughout the agreement, instead of using the employee’s real name. The employee can be referred to as “it”, “them” or “their” wherever necessary. This bakes-in gender-neutrality throughout the document, and you won’t need to update every clause that uses a pronoun.
