Gender equality is also becoming increasingly important for online shops in terms of communication. She can decide whether customers like to shop with you. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to communicate in a gender-sensitive manner.
Trusted Shops with tips on how you can design the communication in your online shop in a gender-sensitive manner in order to address all of your customers equally and not to exclude anyone.
Why is gender-sensitive communication important?
Although many people are still unfamiliar with the use of gender-sensitive language, it helps to combat inequalities between the sexes. If you use gender-neutral personal names in your online shop and communicate in a gender-neutral way, you show appreciation for all groups who (do not want to) can be summarized under “male”.
Do I have to communicate gender-neutrally in my online shop?
German legislation does not prohibit generic personal names such as “customers”, but it does not put any obstacles in your way when using gender-neutral names. In the case of direct salutation in forms, you should either not use the mandatory field “Salutation” if this is not necessary for objective reasons. Alternatively, you can also give other options – as explained below – to choose from.
How do I formulate a neutral form of address?
In addition to the option of making the form field “Salutation” not mandatory, you can add a third option, “Neutral Salutation”. A fourth option, “No answer” (ideally preselected) is also available. Since there is basically no legal obligation to use a salutation, you can leave out the “Salutation” field completely. The additional options affect the direct salutation that you use in your newsletters, order confirmations, personalized website areas of your online shop and in other places. If a user selects the salutation “Ms.”, you can of course greet this customer as usual with “Dear Ms. Müller”, “Dear Ms. Meier” or “Hello Ms. Schmidt”. However, if no salutation or a neutral salutation is selected, it will not work. Instead of “Mr.” or “Ms.” you can simply use the first name and surname as a neutral salutation. For example, we think the following greetings read quite well:
- – “Hello Hans Müller”
- – “Hello Inga Schmidt”
What forms can I use when gendering?
There are many different ways of gendering or gender-neutral expressing personal names. Here are some of the most common forms:
Double or pair shape
Probably the most common Duden-compliant solution is the double or pair form, in which you address women and men equally explicitly. This variant does not disturb the flow of reading and is widely accepted. However, texts become longer, which can be problematic in some places in your online shop. In addition, people who (cannot) assign themselves to either the male or the female gender are not included.
- – “Customers”
- – “customer”
Genderstern
The gender star has meanwhile established itself as the preferred spelling over other variants such as the Binnen-I (“customers”) or the brackets (“customers”). Just like the underscore or gender gap (“customers”), it includes all genders. Unfortunately, the spelling with a gender star is currently not ideal for search engine optimization and can lead to problems in legal contexts in which the star is reserved as a symbol.
Genderdoppelpunkt
Even more inclusive – due to the readability through software – is the gender double point. It should be in no way inferior to the gender star, but thanks to its machine readability it is more accessible than the star, since speech output programs simply take a short break instead of reading out the punctuation mark. Accordingly, the colon is also becoming more and more common, especially in online texts. There is evidence that the gender colon could win the race.
Conclusion
Nowadays, online shops should definitely give thought to whether and how they design their communication in a gender-sensitive manner. In order to achieve this goal, you can adapt your forms so that the salutation is either omitted entirely or the options “No information” and “Neutral salutation” are added.
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