Gender-Neutral Style

Characters

Some languages (for example, German) have two forms (masculine and feminine) for most words describing people. In German, feminine nouns usually carry the ‘-in’ suffix. The best way to address people would be to name both, while placing the feminine form first:

Liebe Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter, […]

This, however, takes a lot of space which might be impractical for user interfaces. A solution would be to use a character to separate ‘-in(nen)’ from the masculine word stem.

Star

The gender star is being used a lot in German. However, it takes more space than "Binnen-I" or a colon. It also may be harder for the eyes to focus on the text with asterisks, since they are typically placed in superscript.

Liebe Mitarbeiter*innen, […]

Binnen-I

Binnen-I describes writing the letter I of ‘-in(nen)’ in capital, as to indicate the change. This is not the best solution, as some of them might confuse I with a lowercase L.

Liebe MitarbeiterInnen, […]

Colon

This is my favourite way to specify gender-neutral nouns in German. It takes less space than an asterisk or an underscore would, is placed in lowercase and is pretty to look at.

Liebe Mitarbeiter:innen, [...]