Pro-Tip: Don't Put Pronouns On Your Resume

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I can talk—a lot. I can have a Formula 1-like stream of consciousness as I make the hairpin turn from describing how much yeast I use in my pizza dough recipe to my greatest educational achievement of completing my three-hour Civil War final in 30 minutes.

While at times that can be useful, other times it can be annoying, or worse, you can talk yourself out of a positive interaction. Since I am more or less housebroken in the domain of human interactions (more or less), I check that impulse.

A college career coach told me it’s great that I’m a conversationalist, but there are times and places for it, and rambling on in a job interview is not the place for it. Answer their questions and be done.

That’s relevant advice for any job seeker, but especially those who drift to the side of aggravating everyone who dares to enter their sphere.

On a subject unrelated to having prospective employers prefer to spend time with Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumber than with you, let’s check out this analysis from Business.com on “nonbinary” people putting their pronouns on their job applications.

I don’t want to get into a big debate about if “nonbinary” is a real thing or not. I’ll just let this chick do my talking for me.

Gee… you’re saying that people who replace a personality with a pronoun are having a more challenging time finding employment? The next thing you’ll tell me is that they found Hunter Biden’s coke at the White House this week.

In their study, Business.com attempted to gauge workplace discrimination against nonbinary people by:

1. Sending out “two “phantom” resumes to 180 job postings. The resumes were identical [with a gender neutral name], except the test resume included they/them pronouns, and the control did not.”

2. If the pronoun resume was rejected, they contacted the hiring managers to find out why…as if they needed to hire Poirot to crack the case.

They compare the study to the one run by the University of Chicago and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2003, which evaluated racial bias in hiring practices. However, likening these is an apples-to-stegosaurus comparison.

The racial study performed their evaluation by changing the names on the resumes. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a “resume,” including your name is not notable. I’ve always preferred to be called Gordon in an interview rather than “candidate 805p40,” but that’s just my taste.

However, including pronouns is tantamount to using a blowhorn to screech, “I will mau-mau anyone who dares to misgender me because changing my pronouns is the only time I have felt control over my life.”

Since the “researchers” didn’t get the results they wanted (which I will get to in a minute), they intentionally misrepresented the study in their summary:

As major layoffs sweep through the U.S. workforce, these timely data show that nonbinary individuals may have a more difficult time finding new jobs. Despite increased awareness of the gender spectrum and the growing popularity of workplace bias training, employers still have more work to do to erase discrimination from their hiring processes and workplaces. [empahsis added]

In a three-card Monte show of their sleight of hand, they misrepresent a critical nuance in their summary. The study actually shows that people who claim to be “nonbinary” and put it on their resume might have a more challenging time finding an entry-level job, which brings me to two critical points.

The resume they used in the study

First, going back to my point about telling an employer what they need to know - if you are applying for a call center job or a warehouse clerk, your pronouns have as much to do with the prospective role as who you voted for as class president your senior year of high school and who you favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is.

If they were applying for a job at some woke organization where you have to be a they/them/your/your/theirs/mine/xir/comrade, pronoun away my deeply confused friend. If not, why include it?

The only conceivable reason is that our government educational system has led you to believe that haranguing people about using your proper pronouns is a replacement for a personality…which leads me to my second point.

For any entry-level job, among the hundreds of candidates up for consideration, there are two non-negotiable qualifications:

1. A basic aptitude for learning the job.

2. Don’t annoy me.

And #2 might be more important than #1.

If there is the slightest chance you will fail at either of these litmus tests, you are d-u-n, done, and including your non-binary pronouns on your resume is a guaranteed fail of #2 and a high likelihood of #1.

To get the waterworks going, they asked 400 nonbinary people how they felt their status as nonbinary would affect their job search.

Nonbinary people feel like they are discriminated against? Here I thought they would say they are treated as an equal member of society and reject any special privileges they may be offered. I clearly didn’t have my finger on the pulse of that one.

Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not, but again why is it relevant? If I felt that being a 2020 Trump voter was of such central importance to my identity that I put it on my resume, a hiring manager would be well within their rights to decide I have poor judgment and that they don’t want to deal with my MAGA ass.

When you compete for a job with hundreds of other applicants, the hiring managers will find any reason to weed you out from the pool. You can deal with the real world or not; that is up to xir.

Am I hired yet?

Maybe we should add a section on resumes, right below your name and pronouns, entitled Reasons You’re a Bigot If You Don’t Hire Me, and then people can go ahead and list off all their grievances. If the most complaints win, my fellow Jews will still come out on top…trust me.

For all of the consternation about how this study definitively proves that nonbinary people don’t have a chance in the world, the difference in response between the neutral and pronoun resume was nearly insignificant, “72 percent of managers said they’d contact the applicant on the control resume, but only 69 percent would want to interview the applicant whose resume contained “they/them” pronouns.”

In fact, some hiring managers were willing to give the pronoun people a chance over the neutral resumes specifically because they had the pronouns included:

If the managers felt that the pronoun resume was 7% less qualified, but they were only 4% less likely to give them an interview, that tells me that there are hiring managers out there who are willing to give unqualified people an interview for no reason other than the fact they had their pronouns included on their CVs. Nice scam if you can get it, I suppose.

This is gendered people discrimination at its finest…

Free at last, free at last, the gendered people will be free at last!

Everyone with an operational frontal lobe knew how this study would turn out, and even if it didn’t, they would ensure it did. So why do it? Simple…the DEI consultant scam is running low on steam as the results of their utterly failed corporate racial experiment become apparent, and they need a new grift. That’s all there is to it.

But ultimately, I’ll just let the superb Wesley Yang summarize for me:

The moral of the story is if you want to get a job, present yourself in the best possible way. If you don’t want a job and would rather bitch and moan about how the world is unfair against people who grew up reading Gender Queer as a kid instead of The Lord Of The Rings, make sure to include your pronouns on your resume.

_Comstock