NASA instructs employees to remove pronouns from all work communications
NASA instructs employees to remove pronouns from all work communications
16 comments
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“Am trying to comply with the directive,” staffer said, but talking to is difficult when I can’t use pronouns. Even referring to the space station as is not allowed in conversation anymore.”
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So, remove he, she, they, them, it from the entire message and use only proper names.
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To HR office,
Walking into the office this morning, I saw Tom in the parking lot, waved at Tom, and wished Tom a good morning. Tom then asked if I had seen Phil, wondering how "he"(!!!) was doing. I reminded Tom that of the newly-enacted no-pronouns policy and informed Tom that Tom should be careful in the future, or Tom could face consequences for not following policy!
As a good friend of Tom, I know Tom didn't mean to sound too liberal by it, but for Tom's own good I had to remind Tom of his mistake.
Sincerely, -Loyal NASA Employee
/s
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Unless there's more text that isn't quoted, the article title doesn't seem to reflect the article body text.
This is what the article title says:
NASA instructs employees to remove pronouns from all work communications
This is what the article body says:
"In response to the Executive Orders, NASA has disabled features in id.nasa.gov and Teams that allows users to add pronouns in their display name in Microsoft Outlook and Teams," the email reads. "For users who have previously added pronouns to their display name, those pronouns will be automatically removed from the system this week."
It also references a signature block, says that it's standardizing on one, and I suppose that a current one could contain a pronoun:
"In addition," the email says, "NASA has adopted a uniform signature block for emails that are sent using any nasa.gov email address. All users (civil servants, contractors, and grantees) must modify their signature block to follow the appropriate signature block… the signature block should not include additional embellishment."
That body text doesn't seem to me to say that pronouns can't be used in work communications. It says that they are removed from three points:
- The display name in Microsoft Outlook.
- The display name in Microsoft Teams.
- Email signature blocks. The quoted text doesn't mention pronouns, but one assumes that maybe one could contain them, though I'd think that there it's more-likely to be an honorific, like "Mr.", "Mrs.", etc.
I don't believe, based on that body text, that use of pronouns would be prohibited in, say, email text or chats, or whatever. Like, if someone sent out a message to their team, "Jim and I are going out to lunch, and he's offered to pay for anyone else on the team who is coming", from the article text, I don't believe that that'd be prohibited. As someone else points out below with some example text, that'd probably be impractical (especially given existing text that does use pronouns).
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I don’t believe, based on that body text, that use of pronouns would be prohibited in, say, email text or chats, or whatever.
So to comply with the rules, a user could use a Quick Steps default template of the Outlook for "new email" to automatically insert a sentence at the top of the body of every email:
"My pronouns are he/him" etc.
Since this isn't in the signature block, nor is it in the display name of Outlook or Teams, it would comply with the rules. If one were looking to do that you'd find the instructions here: link
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Hmmm so where can I add pronouns to my Teams username? I'd like to use this feature if possible 😁
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Admins can enable it in the Teams portal, if that happens, it becomes visible to users
Otherwise the option is hidden
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16 comments