Pronouns in Email Signatures: Why a Small Line of Text Still Matters

TL;DR: US federal agencies have been ordering employees to strip pronouns from their email signatures, and the White House press office has reportedly declined to respond to journalists whose signatures include them. We think that’s the wrong call, and this article says plainly why — then gets practical about how to support pronouns properly in Microsoft 365: turn on the native, opt-in Pronouns feature, and understand the separate (and currently clunky) step needed to also surface pronouns in a centrally managed signature.

A small line of text, a large fight

Over the past eighteen months, three words in an email footer have become an unlikely political flashpoint. Since taking office, the Trump administration has moved to strip pronouns from federal employees’ email signatures, citing executive orders framed around “biological truth” and the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes (The Dispatch). Agencies including the State Department, the CDC and the Department of Transportation were given same-day deadlines to remove them, according to internal memos reported by ABC News and NBC New York. The White House press office has reportedly gone further still, declining to respond to journalists whose email signatures include pronouns, on the grounds that doing so signals they can’t be trusted to write honest stories (Fortune).

It’s easy to watch that unfold from a UK business and think it’s a US government story that doesn’t touch us. We don’t think that’s right. Policy fights like this ripple outward — into how comfortable people feel bringing a small piece of themselves to work, and into how other organisations quietly second-guess practices they’d previously stopped thinking twice about. So it feels like a good moment to say plainly where we stand, and then to get practical about it.

Where we stand

Adding pronouns to an email signature costs almost nothing and asks almost nothing of anyone. Nobody is required to include them, and including them doesn’t oblige a colleague to do the same. What it does is remove a small, recurring moment of friction and risk for trans, non-binary and gender-nonconforming colleagues — the moment where they have to decide, again, whether to correct someone or let a misgendering slide because raising it feels like more trouble than it’s worth.

For everyone else, it does something quieter but still useful: it normalises the idea that you ask rather than assume, and it signals that a workplace has thought about who might otherwise feel unseen. That’s basic workplace courtesy, extended to people who’ve historically had very little of it extended to them at all.

We’d also push back gently on the idea that this is purely symbolic. Muted or invisible groups don’t become visible through grand gestures alone — they become visible through hundreds of small, repeated signals that they’re expected, welcome and not going to be a surprise to the people around them. A signature line is one of those signals. Removing it doesn’t restore neutrality; it just removes a form of support that some people relied on and others never noticed they had the luxury of not needing.

To be clear, this isn’t a “both sides” issue for us. Declaring your pronouns is a normal, reasonable thing to do, and nobody should have to justify wanting to be addressed correctly. Where we do think it’s worth being deliberate is in the mechanics: pronouns should be opt-in rather than mandated, because the goal is to give people a way to be seen, not to hand anyone a new box to fill in. Keep it lightweight, let people add or remove pronouns whenever they like, and don’t require an explanation either way.

Making it opt-in and easy: Microsoft 365

If you want to support this without turning it into a policy fight, the goal is simple: let people add pronouns if they want to, make it easy, and don’t force it. In Microsoft 365 that’s genuinely two separate features — one that Microsoft manages for you, and one that’s on your own signature platform to handle.

1. Turn on the native Pronouns feature. Microsoft added an org-wide pronouns setting to Microsoft 365 a few years ago, and it’s off by default. A Global Administrator or People Administrator needs to enable it first:

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Settings > Org settings > Security & privacy, select Pronouns, then turn on Turn on and allow pronouns and save. (It’s also reachable from the newer Settings > Org settings > People settings hub, alongside name pronunciation and profile card customisation.)
Once it’s on, each person can add, change or remove their own pronouns by opening their profile card — click your name or photo in Teams or in Outlook on the web — and selecting the pronouns field underneath your name. There’s nothing to configure per user; it’s entirely self-serve.
Pronouns then appear next to a person’s name on the profile card in Outlook, Teams and anywhere else that card shows up, but only for people who’ve chosen to set them. Changes can take up to seven hours to appear org-wide after the feature is first turned on.

This is the cleanest option because it’s genuinely opt-in at the individual level, sits alongside the person’s name rather than being buried in a signature block, and requires no ongoing admin maintenance once it’s switched on.

2. Reflect it in the actual signature. Here’s the part that trips people up: the native Pronouns feature from step 1 lives on a first-party-only surface. Microsoft Graph’s pronouns API exposes only an org-level on/off toggle for whether the feature is switched on — not the pronoun value any individual has typed into their profile card. That means signature platforms, including SigHQ, Exclaimer, CodeTwo and Xink, currently can’t read what someone set in step 1 and pull it into a centrally managed signature.

So getting pronouns into the signature itself means a second, separate step:

Manual: add a merge-style placeholder to your signature template (e.g. “Jordan Lee (they/them)”) and let each person fill in or remove the bracketed part when they set up their signature.
Directory-driven: store pronouns in a legacy on-premises AD extensionAttribute (one of extensionAttribute1–15) and sync it through Microsoft Entra Connect. These land on the Entra user object as onPremisesExtensionAttributes and are readable through Microsoft Graph with standard directory-read permissions, which makes this the more established route for organisations that already sync from on-premises AD. The alternative is an Entra custom security attribute, which is also Graph-readable but needs its own permission scope — Global Administrator doesn’t grant access by default, so you need someone assigned the Attribute Definition Administrator role to set it up — more moving parts for the same outcome, so it’s worth reaching for only if you don’t have on-premises AD/Entra Connect in the picture.

Worth being upfront about the trade-off: right now, the value used for the signature is stored separately from the native Pronouns feature, so anyone who wants pronouns showing in both Teams/Outlook profile cards and in their email signature has to set them in two places. Not ideal, but it’s the honest state of the platform today, and it’s still a one-off task for each person rather than something IT has to chase.

3. Keep the field genuinely blank-by-default. Whichever route you take, the field should default to empty rather than a placeholder like “(pronouns)”. An empty field is a non-event. A visible placeholder that someone has to actively delete puts the decision back on people who’d rather it just wasn’t there — which defeats the point. This is the same logic worth applying to any optional, personal field on a signature — see our guide on structuring signatures for HR and internal comms for more on keeping personalisation genuinely optional rather than a checkbox someone has to opt out of.

The bigger picture

None of this is complicated to build. What’s complicated is the environment it’s landing in, where a punctuation-level detail in an email footer has become a proxy for a much larger argument about who gets to be visible at work. Our view is straightforward: make it optional, make it easy, and let people decide for themselves. That’s not a political statement so much as it is just good, considerate workplace design — and it’s worth defending even when the noise around it gets loud.

Frequently asked questions

Does Microsoft 365 let IT admins see or set pronouns on someone’s behalf?

No, not directly. Global Administrators and People Administrators can only turn the org-wide feature on or off; the pronoun value itself is set and edited entirely by the individual user on their own profile card. Nobody else can add or change another person’s pronouns.

Not today. The Microsoft Graph pronouns API only reports whether the feature is enabled for the organisation, not what any individual user has set. A signature tool has to get pronoun text from a separate source — a manual field the user fills in, or a directory attribute like a legacy extensionAttribute or an Entra custom security attribute.

Should pronouns be mandatory in email signatures?

No. The point of adding pronouns is to let people who want to be correctly addressed do so easily — not to force a disclosure on people who’d rather not make one, for reasons ranging from personal preference to genuine safety in some contexts. Keep the field opt-in, default it to blank, and never require a reason for leaving it empty.

How long does it take for a pronouns change to show up in Microsoft 365?

Turning the feature on or off for the organisation can take up to seven hours to reach every user. Once the feature is on, an individual’s own change to their pronouns updates on their profile card immediately after they save it.

SigHQ is building an add-in-first email signature management tool for Microsoft 365 organisations of 50–250 employees — signatures applied in Outlook at compose time, without email routing through third-party infrastructure. Join the waitlist to follow progress.