At my new job at Procurify, I got access to our HR software but it only has two choices for the “gender” field: Male and Female. Our team reached out to the HRIS customer support and asked to add a custom field to have more choice and reflect our diverse team.

We want to be as inclusive as possible, within the confines of the software and the ability to run clean, insightful reports to track any patterns for attrition, salary and advancement and flag equity issues.

How to populate the custom field? Leaving it completely editable could result in anyone putting in anything — including misspellings or capitalization — which could make the data prone to needing manual edits, so a drop-down of choices made sense. After consulting our team, we decided to name it “Gender Pronoun” so our team could self-identify with a richness to the gender spectrum and let their teammates know their pronouns.

The Gender Pronoun drop-down now has choices of:

• He/Him
• She/Her
• They/Them
• They/Him
• They/Her
• and “If you don’t see how you identify here, please ask”