Email signature generator › Pronouns

Pronouns in an email signature

Including pronouns is a personal choice, and both including and omitting them are entirely normal. This page is about the practical question: if you do include them, how should the line be written.

Placement: beside the name, not on its own line

The convention that reads most naturally is directly after the name, in brackets or after a separator: Anna Meier (she/her) or Anna Meier · she/her. It sits where a reader is already looking, costs no vertical space, and does not draw attention to itself.

A separate line makes the signature taller and gives the line more weight than it needs. A separate line in a different colour or size gives it more still.

Form

Two forms are standard: she/her and she/her/hers. The two-part form is more common and shorter. Multiple sets are written with an or: they/she or they/them or she/her. Whichever you choose, the important property is that it is short enough not to wrap.

Where the reader will look

Signatures are read from the top down and abandoned quickly. A reader who wants to know how to address you looks at the name; putting the pronouns there means they find them without searching. Putting them at the bottom, under the phone number, means most readers never see them, which defeats the purpose of including them at all.

Organisational policy

Some organisations encourage pronouns in signatures, some supply a template with a slot for them, and some leave it alone entirely. Where a template exists, use it — an inconsistent format across a company looks like nobody agreed on one. Where one does not, the placement above is the safe default.

Requiring them is a different matter and is generally avoided, because it can force a disclosure that some people do not wish to make.

The technical detail worth knowing

Some clients detect the slash and treat the string as a fraction or as a path in a way that changes the spacing. Using a thin space or no space around the slash — she/her rather than she / her — avoids the ambiguity and is also the more common written form.

If your signature uses a middle dot as a separator between elements, keep the pronouns inside the same visual group as the name rather than after the dot, so that a client that wraps the line does not separate them.

Consistency across devices

If you have a full signature on the desktop and a short one on the phone, and the pronouns are only in the full one, a reader who first hears from you on a phone reply will not see them. Since the phone signature usually carries the name anyway, adding four characters to it costs nothing and keeps the two consistent.

The markup, so nothing wraps in the wrong place

Keep the name and the pronouns inside the same table cell, with a   before the opening bracket: Anna Meier (she/her). That non-breaking space stops a narrow screen from putting the pronouns on their own line, which is the one layout that makes them look like an afterthought.

Size and colour

Same size as the name, or one step smaller — 14 pixels next to a 15-pixel name reads as a natural aside. Use the secondary grey rather than the primary text colour so the eye still lands on the name first. Do not use a brand colour or a highlight; anything that draws attention makes the line read as a statement rather than as information.

Consistency across a team

If several people in a team include them and the format differs — brackets for one, a slash separator for another, a separate line for a third — the inconsistency is what a reader notices. Agreeing one format costs a single message and removes the question entirely.

Frequently asked questions