Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. Like to join me in the future? Then please do drop me a line to Joe Lockwood at m dot co UK that's seechangehappen co UK. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on itunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is Episode 84 with the title Unlocking Inclusive Communications. And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Suzanne Worthheim.

Suzanne describes herself as a linguistic anthropologist, and when I asked Suzanne to describe her superpower, she said that she sees patterns that other people don't see. Hello, Suzanne. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Joanne. It is genuinely a pleasure to be here. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Likewise. We've had a great chat and agreement already, so I'm really, really excited about this. So, Suzanne, tell me. Unlocking communications. Tell me about that.

So I said my superpower was seeing patterns that other people can't see. And this is the superpower of almost everybody who is a linguist or a linguistic anthropologist. And so I am here to talk to people here, generally in the world, and here on this podcast, about how can we be more inclusive in our communications. And inclusive communication, in some respects, is as simple as just Bites modern etiquette. It is 21st century etiquette. But if you want to be more pattern based and more behaviour based, I like to talk about inclusive language and inclusive communication as a way of communicating in a set of behaviours. A lot of people will talk about it as a list of words. Here are bad words and here are good words.

But I like to go beyond that and have a very behavioural focus. What are people doing with their language? So when we communicate inclusively, people feel seen and heard and valued. People feel like they are taken into consideration and like they matter. By contrast, when we use what I call problematic language, and there are lots of words that people will use that maybe end with IST or ism, but I like to just call it problematic language. Problematic language comes in many forms and has really negative outcomes. It can damage relationships, it lowers trust, it drives people away and it harms all kinds of relationships. And by relationships, I mean personal relationships. So between family members, friends, colleagues, romantic partners.

But I also mean business relationships could be still interpersonal between a recruiter and a client, a recruiter and a candidate. But it could also be a marketing message and an audience or customer experience, software interfaces and clients who become so irritated that they stop using your product. So that's what I mean by patterns. The patterns that I talk about for inclusive communication can be both one on one and media and planned communications that go out and affect many people, sometimes millions of people.

You're speaking my language. You're speaking my language. One thing that people always come to me and say is they're so afraid of getting it wrong. And that creates this kind of lean back approach to people, because I've never had a conversation with someone who is black, I've never had some conversation with someone who's transgender or has a disability or what if I say the wrong thing? That's the biggest fear people say, is the fear of getting it wrong.

It is a thing that I hear as well. And it is one of the reasons that I wrote my book, because people would feel better after a workshop with me, and a workshop would be very dedicated to the precise thing. So if you bring me in for recruiters, I'll do inclusive language for recruiters. If you bring me in for sales team, I'll do inclusive language for sales. So we're covering some things, but we have a limited amount of time together. And people would say to me, oh, my people are still nervous, or I'm still nervous, or executives would say to me, there are so many things I'm supposed to cover in an all hands meeting, or when I'm interviewing with somebody and I'm really afraid of getting cancelled. So some people are worried about the wrath of the Internet or getting cancelled. It's more self focused and some people are more worried about hurting somebody else.

And so this lack of resources out there has been bothering me for a long time. And so this is why I realised it wasn't a question of ego, where I thought, I simply must write a book, right? It was really more people kept on being so stressed out and so nervous. And when you're paralysed by fear and you don't say anything, sometimes it really lands just the silence is communication in and of itself and it will land very badly on people who expect you to reach out. So this is exactly why I decided to do the work that I do. And I will say that you might have wanted to ask me this later, and I'm just going to say it right now. One of the reasons that my discussion of inclusive language and inclusion communication is different from other people's is I'm the only person I know that starts with behaviour rather than identity. So a lot of people will come and say, there are so many people in the world, I can't keep track of them. I grew up in a very homogeneous way.

My workplace is very homogeneous. I don't know. And so it can feel so overwhelming and so exhausting to think about all the people in the world and all the words related to all the people in the world can feel like too much. So that's why I've come up with six principles that allow you to learn more and also make mistakes and correct them in a way that you feel like you always have a North Star. So I'm just going to say them. I'm not going to wait for you to team me up and I'll just say them. They are reflect reality, show respect, draw people in, incorporate other perspectives, prevent erasure and recognise pain points. So these are always that people want themselves to be treated in some respects.

They're kind of a golden rule of interactions. And so if you can be precise about when somebody is different from you, how do you show respect or how do you make sure you're not marginalising them or how do you recognise the pain points? These are things that can be small research projects that people can get a grip on rather than this long list of words that feels nebulous. And PS is changing all the time. So you can't just go by memorising lists of words because by the time you memorised it, there's a good chance that some of the things that were okay aren't okay anymore.

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there, to use a British term, into the person that translates into American perfectly well. Excellent. I think the key thing for me is you actually care about how the other person's going to feel when you talk to them. I think you mentioned it in respect and the other elements of your six points, but if I have enough care about your feelings, your needs, your use the word identity, if you like, your lived experience, what matters to you, what makes you happy, what makes you sad. If I care deeply about that, I want a positive communication, I want a positive outcome from our conversation, then I think that's the basis then everything builds on the fact that I want this to go well. And if I don't know all the, as you say, every single word in the dictionary, I don't have to know every single word, I just have to know that I will not always get it right. And I appreciate that intent isn't everything. The impact kicks in there and bit of accountability as well, making sure I own my words.

But the important thing there is I have to really care that I want you to have a positive experience and for me that's always been the root of it. If I care enough, I will do my best to get it right.

I think that a combination of caring enough, be open to critical feedback to fix mistakes in the moment and doing some prep work. If you can do those three, then you can have a successful conversation with anybody. I think that there are some people who are on the receiving end of people being ignorant about what their lived experience is to the point where it's exhausting, right? So I don't want to just say that if you say to somebody, well, just educate me, or if I say a wrong word, please tell me. Because a lot of times people who are on the receiving end of these things are just done, just done. But if you show that you've already done some homework and you come in and you say, well, I know this, so is this okay? I know I shouldn't say hey guys. So I'm going to say hey folks, or hey people, is that okay with you? Is a story we can talk about a little bit later about a sales call gone wrong and then gone right again. But I think that if you have that combo and show that you've cared enough to put in some work in advance, then people are going to feel they're not educating you from scratch. The burden of education isn't on them.

The burden of explaining to you in a way that won't make you upset or angry isn't on them because you've put in that work. And so that's why I like to recommend people certain kinds of homework, like diversifying your social media. So you start even if you have a homogeneous group, because of the ways that things are set up, like even if you grew up in a homogeneous way and your workplace is homogeneous, social media is a gift, is a gift, gift, gift. And you can eavesdrop on conversations without bothering anybody and learn all kinds of things almost by osmosis.

That's good. What you just said there, again, it resonates because I talk a lot about emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence. And both of those first steps in both of those emotional intelligence is about self awareness, how you come across. And cultural intelligence is all around the drive to develop knowledge. So what you're saying here is you have to put the legwork in first, don't turn up, expect me to be your educator, which I completely resonate with. So you've got to have that drive. You've got to care enough about how you come across to build the knowledge. And then for the knowledge you build a strategy.

So yeah, having that groundwork is really important. I concur. We have Google in our pockets, don't we? We have millions and billions of hours of YouTubes and podcasts and books and Amazon. There's not a lot of excuse really for people not to do the basics, is there?

Well, although I would say that publishing and Hollywood have been real gatekeepers. So you have to have a little bit of critical intelligence and thinking about your sources. Because if you just watch movies about a group, they might not have been made by that group. And if you just read books about a group that might have been written by somebody who's out group. So that's one of the gifts from social media is this decentralisation and the removal of the kind of the gatekeeping. You might not get the knowledge from a book that you need, right? So, for example, I recommend to people, let's just use disability as an example. So people who are perceptibly disabled are low frequency for encounters for many people who are abled out in the world. So it's not frequently that they'll meet somebody who's deaf or hard of hearing or who's in a wheelchair or who's blind, just for example.

And so here's a thing where people suddenly are like, oh, my God, I don't know what to say. And they're paralysed or often when we're so self conscious, the last thing that you wanted to come out of your mouth this happens to me, too, when you're nervous, the last thing that you want to come out of your mouth is coming right out of your mouth. And you're like, oh, I can't believe that I said that. So I talk about this sometimes where somebody gets a bad haircut and in your head you're like, don't mention the haircut. Like, don't mention the haircut. And then you're out of your lips comes, oh, you got a haircut. And then you have to make a comment on it when really you just wanted to say nothing. So what I like for the prep is, for example, I don't think in the book you're going to find stuff, but you can just go to Google or any search engine and type in problematic things said to wheelchair users, problematic things said to blind people, problematic things said to deaf people.

And they'll just tell you, like, it's just out there. It takes very little time. So I would say even having these kinds of directed searches, if you're prepped and you're like, then you're ready to go, right? So it might seem like you're trying to care about somebody. So let's say there's somebody in a wheelchair, and it might feel caring to you to say, oh, how is it that you're in a wheelchair? But I'm going to tell you that every wheelchair person, every wheelchair person is absolutely not the thing to say. Your wheelchair user is what I was trying to say. Every person in a wheelchair, every wheelchair user that I've talked with or read things by or heard things by, they absolutely have no interest in explaining to you why they are in a wheelchair. And intrusive questions are incredibly common. And so something that might feel like caring or curiosity to you might land as very intrusive and inappropriate to somebody else who's just like, can we just talk about my presentation? Why are we talking about how do I put on pants? Why is this now part of the conversation?

We kind of make a bigger deal of it than it really is because that's our insecurity, our nervousness, whatever it may be. I've got a great friend of mine, she's a black woman. She is a wheelchair user. She has cerebral palsy at birth. And I remember we were going, I think we're going something to eat. And I said, should we just walk to the pub or something? And I was going, oh my God. I said, Walk to the pub? You're a wheelchair user. And I got all heats in my brain.

She said, yeah, let's go for a walk, that's fine. And so she doesn't use necessarily different language. She uses contemporary language around the activity. And I was making a bigger deal of it than it was because I picked up the word walk and is that ableist? And it turned out that I was probably overcooking it. I think sometimes we just got to relax and learn about not necessarily taking every single word we say too literally and apologise for it, but just feel the mood. If they said, oh yeah, I've got my powered chair, I'll follow you, whatever, just pick up on their language.

And I would say that that's the kind of thing over apologising is also a thing that I hear from people from marginalised and underrepresented groups who don't want to feel othered, right? So my third principle is draw people in is the reverse of marginalising, right? So there's a lot of ways that we interact with people that highlight difference. People who feel like they just want to be there in belonging and just treated like everybody else end up feeling very othered. And so over apologising is one of the things that happens. So I was talking to somebody who is non binary and they have a manager who can't figure out pronouns at this point, like figure it out, right? But so in early stages we understand and as a linguist, I'll tell you that pronouns are different from other words and language and we store them in our brain differently and they're grammar words. And it's much harder to shift your use of words in this closed set of grammar words than other words. You wouldn't change numbers very easily or prepositions, right? So there are ways that it is very reasonable to have a struggle with pronouns as people say, oh, actually my pronouns are this. And you haven't had unlike young people today, natively use they them for a single person, right? But for a lot of us who grew up earlier, they them wasn't used for a single unknown person or for plural people, but not for a single known person. So it can be a real struggle against the weight.

Of all the times that we've used only she or he to talk about people. So the thing that you do is you just do a minor correction. Oh, yes, so and so she, oh, I'm sorry, they and then you move on. But this manager was, oh my goodness, I'm so sorry, I've done it again. Look at this. I really need to respect that you're nonbinary and on and on and on. So the apology itself was a problem, was problematic language because it was highlighting the otherness. So I think that you can take the cues in the moment here's that emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence.

You're talking about having the ability to live in the moment and see, oh, I said walk. Should I apologise? And you could say, oh my God, I said walk. They'll be like, oh, no problem. And then aside, you don't have to worry about walk with them anymore. So these are the kinds of things that you file away in your mental database for interacting with that person. But PS, just because one wheelchair user says it's okay to say walk does not mean you can apply it to everybody. So you got to suss that out person by person.

Of course, yeah, my experience is my experience and yours differs. Talking about misgendering, I misgender myself. I spent 52 years of my life using one set of pronouns and referring to myself in a certain way. For the last seven so years I've used she her and I can't get it right every time. And my wife is probably better at than I do. She never gets it wrong. But it was our daughter's wedding a couple of years ago and I remember and I'm still dad and still father to our daughter. So I'm extremely proud of that in my life, so I'm not going to lose that.

But I remember I did the father of the bride speech and it's almost impossible to not use male pronouns in this because I said there's no prouder moment in a father's life than when he gives his daughter away. You try and say that sentence with the word she in there instead of he. Linguistically, my head couldn't handle it. So I did the entire father of white speech and I said at the end of it, I've just systematically misgendered myself four times in this speech, but it didn't make sense to me to say it any other way, but that's my experience. There are other people who want to identify as mum or wife or wherever they do and they use different pronouns. As I say, that's my experience. That's the way I treat myself and everyone else is different. So, yeah, you can't know everybody by knowing one person.

And I would add to that that not everybody uses they them pronouns. Some people who are genderqueer or in other way non binary will have pronouns that are very, very low frequency. So this is again why I have these principles. Oh, to show respect and draw in this person right. To show respect for them and draw them in. I have to remember that they're using fay fair, right. So that's also a thing that happens. I think misgendering yourself is okay because of the complexities.

I mean, that story is fantastic because it shows the complexities of being very prescriptive about how a person is supposed to be. And let me tell you this, that let's just go to Gatekeeping right? So this happens with disability. I don't know if it happens as much with transgender people, but people who are really trying to walk the walk and be good and learning can get very judgmental and gatekeeping and will lecture people about the language they use for themselves. So I read a few books by disabled activists and in one of them one of the authors talks about how she's a wheelchair user. And so the question of and in the UK and the US, people have landed on different sides of things. Do you say a person with a disability or do you say a disabled person and which one is the right one? So I was listening to somebody recently who does research, disability research, and they publish in English for both a UK and a US audience. And so they're really stymied as to what do I do for the most inclusive choice. And so I think for those, sometimes you have to do a little preface and say, I'm going to be using this language.

But in any case, this wheelchair user named Emily Lido said that she had switched over to saying disabled person. And people would say to her, oh no, you should really say person with a disability. And she would say, but I'm disabled. Well, don't talk about yourself like that. I don't think of you as a disabled person, right? So I talk a lot about stigma. Stigma is a thing that happens a lot in society where a group is socially devalued, is marginalised. It's part of what comes with the marginalisation and the lack of access to power is you get a lot of stigma where a group is just seen as less than, and sometimes not just less than, but stigmatised in some way, right? So for example, people with mental health issues, that's very highly stigmatised, people with disabilities, disabled people, depending on what people prefer. And so you can hear that stigma in don't talk about yourself like that or I don't even think of you as disabled.

I have black friends who also people have said to them, oh, I don't even think of you as black. And it's like, is that supposed to be a compliment? So there's that kind of gatekeeping. I can imagine a scenario where somebody who's being very assiduous and is just learning how to do pronouns, right, would come up and say, whoo, you really need to get better with your pronouns. I hear people who are in group getting lectured by out group people. And so part of my this can be like a lot of navel gazing, inclusive language. Well, what exact term, what exact term? And my feeling is by showing respect, you use the term that a person prefers. And if you're with a group of people who aren't monolithic, then you start to get complicated and you have to explain yourself a little bit more and say, well, for this group of people, I'm going to use the terminology indigenous, but I understand other people prefer native. Or you like a hyperlink or an Asterisk and a footnote to say, I understand that not everybody likes this term, I'm choosing it for these reasons.

So people know that you've put in the work rather than thinking that you're blithely just doing a thing because you don't know any better.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And often when I'm doing talks or running training, I would tend to use multiple ways of describing an identity, a characteristic, whatever it may be, in very short successions. So I might say a person with a disability or a disabled person, as a matter of fact, in a sentence. So acknowledging both terminology and sometimes I might even say, I know that people have a different way of describing themselves and I don't want to judge. I know that people are very proud of being disabled first, and some people prefer to be described as person with a disability. Then you meet someone who has neurodiversity and they prefer to or they use autistic person rather than the person with autism. They're very proud of the autism first. So it's a real minefield, as you say, you have to be very adaptable, very in tune, do your research or at least your basics, as we talked about having that base level of research first.

And where I know there's ambiguity, I try and use all the different language I know to sort of say I'm aware of the discussion points around this, which is why I use both. And if people ask me to clarify, I say, well, I've got some great friends who really are proud to be a disabled person. I've got some great friends who prefer to be a person with a disability or a wheelchair user and those kind of words. So yeah, I think if you coach it in, it's not my language, it's words that I'm using that people have explained to me or their language. I'm just using the language I've been educated with by my friends and my contemporaries. Which language do you prefer? Which is your chosen language? And it allows you to show that education without assuming or without using your own, if you like bias or stereotype about people.

And I find so let me throw a term at you, which is metal linguistic. So metal linguistic language is language about language. So I used to say meta, now it's a giant company. So I would say to people, go meta, and now I can't do that anymore. But I like to educate people. So I talked about my superpower being seeing patterns, right? So when you explain patterns to people so they can see them, I think of it as giving people x ray vision. How much can I what is currently opaque to you or feels unrelated? And I can show you that. I've been digging, digging, digging, and there are these skeletal structures that connect them all.

Like, how can I show that to you? So if you can name something, if you can talk about it, it allows you to more fluently use metal linguistic language and talk about language. And talking about language is one of the best ways to remove ambiguity and to remove negative feelings and to let people know that you're aware of what you're doing and that you're doing it very intentionally and consciously. And it allows us to bypass hurt feelings and misunderstandings in all kinds of ways. So I do encourage people when it comes to inclusive communication, to really be able to talk about language. And that's why getting educated about how language works really facilitates the ability. Because before I said that, I divide language into two sets, or language practises into two sets, there's inclusive language, inclusive communication, and problematic language and problematic communication. Well, a lot of people don't have the terminology for what's going off the rails when communication is problematic, except for the language of social justice or language available to laypeople, which will be terms like sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobic, maybe they'll say it's a microaggression. I find in my many years of experience looking at what people are resistant to and what lands on people, everything I do is designed to bypass resistance and land on people, right, so they can internalise it, take accountability and say, oh, I should make that shift, right? And it's almost always a small shift.

I have found that a very strong stress response trigger a resistance trigger is using words like sexism and homophobia, because a person may be coming in with very good intentions and just inadvertently say a thing. Sometimes people are being absolutely not inadvertently problematic, they are purposefully being problematic. And I have to say, I don't have time or energy for those people go pre problematic elsewhere. I think this is the kind of behaviour that can be a fireable offence. Like, I don't have time and energy for you. But if you really are a well intended person who's like, oh, I got to shift my attention to impact, then I have to say that you can't use words like sexism or homophobia to tell people when they've said something wrong, because they are going to shut down. They're going to feel very attacked. They're going to get very stuck in their own good intentions.

They're going to get hot with shame. They're going to be filled with adrenaline and cortisol, and it might take 48 full hours for those stress chemicals to exit from their bodies. And so that's why another reason why I've devised these principles is if people are going metal linguistic and saying to somebody, hey, I don't think you realised there's this thing that you said or this thing that you wrote and it wasn't the right thing to say, let me explain it. And you can use this violates a principle of inclusive language. It doesn't reflect. Reality because you've acted as if there are no non binary people in the world when you said your husband or wife. And so you've got to switch over to spouse and partner because non binary people exist. And so we need to reflect reality that lands a lot better with people than using the language of social justice, which may be merited, but doesn't land well with almost anybody.

It's the calling it out versus calling it in. It's the educational element, as you say. If you start using words like privilege and the other social justice words, people who hold those privileges, the majority, as you say, tend to shut down. And I'm a great believer that we need to collaborate rather than attack each other because what happens when privilege gets attacked, it pulls the drawbridge up, it starts throwing rocks at you from the ramparts and you don't get anywhere. All you end up doing is having an argument amongst yourselves, attacking the castle until we've really got to try and lower the drawbridge, lower the heat, lower the temperature and have these she say inclusion conversations where you're educating whilst pointing out a better way, rather than just you're wrong. As soon as you put the hand up or the stop or the accusation, defences hit and you say the brain chemicals kick in, education stops.

And I would add to that, that in my experience the more granular you go and the more behavioural you are rather than saying you're an x or you're y something that's sort of a large scale label. If you move away from telling somebody that they are something and saying, oh, here's this habit you have, or here's this tick you have, or here's this word that you use if you go granular and you say when you do x, it has this effect. It makes people feel disrespected or it makes people feel erased or you're hitting a pain point. And I don't think you realise that this word is actually painful for people who've had different experiences from you. If that level of granularity where it's very specifically and I recommend in a workshop series, I have the SBI model for telling people when something has gone wrong and I think that's a good part of calling in. So not my model, I forget who came up with it, but I credit them on the handout that I give. But it's situation, behaviour, impact. So if you go very granular and you say, the situation is this you said this thing, or the situation is we were in a conversation and nonbinary people were there, or you sent out a press release and nonbinary people will be reading it, or A range of people will be reading it.

The behaviour you used, the phrase husband or wife. And this leaves out non binary people, the impact. People who have nonbinary partners, people who are themselves nonbinary are going to feel like you don't see them, you don't care about them. They're not part of your policy. This thing that you said about you, including benefits or whatever, is something that sounds so mundane, right? We're including benefits. And for people who are married, your husband or wife can blah, blah, blah. Well, what if the husband and wife is not a husband or not a wife? Right, so it can seem so mundane, but people who work for you can still feel so othered or forgotten about. Well, do I count? I'm not a husband and I'm not a wife or my partner isn't a husband or a wife.

So if you explain that impact, these people are going to feel othered, they're going to feel sad, they're going to feel disrespected, they're going to feel erased. So if you just make this little switch, everyone's going to feel included. People on ramp onto that much, much better. So that's my I'm going to say something terrible. It's not terrible, but there is a research that shows that if you ask men, this is just going to be male specific. If you ask men, have you ever raped anybody? The vast majority will say no. But if you go granular this is just like anonymous survey work. I believe I have to revisit this study.

If you go granular and say, have you ever done behaviour A? Have you ever done behaviour B? Have you ever done behaviour C? And those behaviours are components of non consensual interactions of rape. The number of men who admit to that shoots up by more than 100% of what it was. So people are not this is, to me, sort of an end case, right? But there are ways that how are we making people feel bad and not caring about them? Inclusion language is still on that spectrum. It's still on the spectrum of other kinds of physical attacks, right? It's a verbal attack. So that's really where I take my granularity. Like if it works for getting people to be, if not accountable, than the first step of acknowledging that they've done something. If it works even for something as horrific and stigmatised as sexual assault, then I promise you it's going to work well for getting people in your organisation to be more accountable for their verbal problems they've created. And by the way, I want to say that this is an oral medium, you and I, but anytime I say, speak and say, I am in my head, including sign languages.

So I just want to say that everything I'm saying also applies to people who are speakers of sign languages and not just oral languages.

That's important to make sure we are enunciating looking at people respectful of people who have hearing loss or hard of hearing, where I see so many speakers on stage, they're turning their head away. They're not looking at the audience. So not everybody who is hard of hearing lip reads. But there are a number of people who have hearing, who still rely on the visual and the audible to better hear the words properly. So it's always important to be consciously inclusive of your communication, not just passively inclusive, because you're talking about inclusive communication and problematic communication there's. The bit in the middle, really, which is the inconsiderate communication is where you're not being passive or negative deliberately, you're just not considering. And I think part of the for me, part of it is making sure that we're actively thinking about your needs as a person. So if I am speaking in front of an audience or a workshop, whatever, I'm making sure that I cheque with everybody, ask if they have any needs in advance and reinforce that whilst I'm wellbeing, is everyone able to hear me okay? Is there anything I need to do differently? Can you see everything okay? Do you need to come to the front really overemphasising and being overly conscious about it to make sure that you're not inadvertently problematic using your language there?

And for my book, I either hired people or quid pro quo people for doing subject matter expert readings of things or lived experience readings of things. So I collaborated with two autistic linguists, getting their PhDs and studying not just autistic, but studying autistic communication. Right. So real subject matter experts to bring in some autistic communications to my book, because historically, I'm so deeply horrified by how my field has marginalised autistic communications and presented things. I very confidently would stand on a stage and say, all people do X. And now I'm like, all holistic people do x all people who aren't there's so many ways all people are marking hierarchies all the time. Gender is incredibly salient and people really care about gender. I'm like, oh, that is really not true for so many autistic communicators.

For them, power is not that interesting and gender is not that interesting. Right. So there's so many ways in which I was excluding people, but, oh, I got caught up in the autistic thing. Oh, I hired people to so, a person I hired, he actually very recently passed away, which I am very sad about. He was a leader in a new kind of linguistics called crip linguistics. So they're reclaiming the word crip, which was a very stigmatised word.

Before.

Yeah, definitely. With reclamation. So you take the word that's been used against you and you use it in group and you give it power. Much like queer the N word for some people, or African descent, not all. So that's the process of reclamation. And so in the book, I had asked him to read very carefully. I was so careful, it took so much effort for me to say, okay, you're reading as a black person and a disabled person. Here are the relevant pages.

Right. I was so careful for the people doing me this favour. And then he just went and read the whole book, which was good, because he had a lot of comments on stuff, but at the beginning of the book I compare communication event planning to regular event planning. I'm saying, look, if you've ever planned an event, you've had to think about who's coming to the event and think about what their needs are and take them into consideration. A lot of people get so paralysed with fear when it comes to language, but I'm like, this is a transferable skill. Have you planned an event? You can plan a communication event. Do you have to send out a press release? Do you have to do an internal email to the whole company? Are you going to create a video? Like all of these things, especially for planned communications, right? Like, if you can plan a party, you can plan communication, you just need an inclusion checklist. Like you would have a party checklist, right? So in the book I had written, have you ever gone to an event where you felt like you were really taken into consideration, like people had really thought about you and really thought about your needs and you really felt included in the event? And this reviewer, a professor of linguistics, said, I've never been to a non deaf event where I felt this way ever in my life.

Ever in my life. He was in his forty s and I honestly teared up. I'm tearing up right now thinking about it, because I had just asked him, out of respect for his fantastic linguistic skills and his knowledge base, right? And I just asked him to read specific pages and then he went and read additional pages because he was curious and then he just put that thing in there and it stopped me. I had to close down and take a walk around the block and just think about I'm very lucky that I was born into the body I was born in, in a lot of ways, right? And it hadn't occurred to me that being born into a body that was hearing and mobile mostly abled I'm not fully abled and I'm not fully neurotypical, which I learned later in life, but I was born into a body that made it so I could very often feel like I belonging in places. And here he had had experiences where unless he was in his specific group, if he was not in his specific, specific group of deaf and hard of hearing people, he never truly felt taking into account. And that was a really brutal place for me to sit and I still sit there sometimes.

Yeah, that reminds me. I'm a member of the Professional Speaking Association in UK and Ireland and we organised two sort of national events per year and we were approached, because I'm on the board, we were approached by someone who is neurodiverse and they came to us and said it would be better if so they came with that. I want to help you improve the event. For me, for others who are neurodiverse or neurodivergent, some people prefer the term neurodivergent, or people who just maybe have some anxiety about walking into spaces they've never been to before. It would be better if you put chairs at the back of the room so people don't have to walk into the space. They can just sneak and sit at the back, become comfortable before they find the chair, have walk through videos so that before they turn up, they can see the entrance, they can see the walks we had to get from A to B. You narrate things that are happening now and next, those kind of things, putting good signage, having a quiet room. And so we went through this whole thing and the feedback we got from the delegates who went and we've just run another one two weeks ago, was that they found the communication was so powerful because they turned up, they knew what they were going to expect.

They just seen the venue. They knew where the reception was, they knew where the venue was. And this is people who cast themselves as neurotypical. So not only a lot of the work I do, I'm sure what you do, it's what helps the one, she helps the many. And that's what we're doing here. We're not saying it's just for you. It's actually we're benefiting the entire cohort or the communities that are involved, not just providing access for someone who has a disability. In my late 50s, I'm not saying I'm getting on, but sometimes I don't want to walk up flight stairs.

So for me it's important to have an escalator, a lift or elevator or something. I don't have a disability. There are people who maybe go skiing, break their leg. They were okay last week, they're not good this week. So we're providing accessible solutions, not just for people who have a lived or a born disability. We're providing anyone who comes into that in their life. So what you're saying there about your examples is about creating solutions for the one that benefit the many. And you don't know who that many is.

They're just there and they appreciate you've.

Cared about say so. A lot of companies don't want to invest in talent retention. I'm just going to put that right up front. I look at where the budgets go, and right now Dei budgets are being slashed. So people are willing to put money into talent acquisition, into client acquisition and client retention. And then there's that quadrant of talent retention where they're like, oh, we don't have the budget, or it's a nice to have. And I'm just like, I'm right now trying to lay out what are the consequences of when you don't put money into workplace culture, because it's very expensive. So I'm here in tech.

There's a lot of engineers making 200 year dollars. And if you lose them, if you lose a 200K engineer, it's at least 300K. That year to replace them, right? Because of all of the losses. For example, I talk about inclusive meetings. When you're trying to design a meeting that is inclusive for somebody who is autistic, somebody who is a speaker of English as their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th language, a lot of people are much more multilingual than where you're sitting or where I'm sitting, depending on where you grew up. If you are making inclusive language for people who are inclusive meetings, for people who come from a culture where you have to have everything in order before you say something. So, for example, a lot of Native American cultures here, especially on the West Coast, you're supposed to go off and practise on your own. And it's the height of rudeness to bring something half baked, right? Like, you have to come.

So if you do these things for these kinds of cultural diversity and you make inclusive meetings, guess who also benefits? Your introvert white male engineer. Right? There are ways in which people think that the benefit is only for a certain kind of person. And I'm like, everybody wants to work in what I call the optimised workplace, so I just call it the optimised workplace. And I'm like, bias gets in the way. And the optimised workplace is where everyone feels seen, heard, and valued, where they feel like they belong, where they're able to make contributions and aren't blocked, and where they feel safe, right? Psychological safety, it's very basic. And I'm like, guess what? Guess who likes to work? There 100% of people. And my data on optimised workplaces comes from business studies. It doesn't come from dei studies.

It's like, oh, here are the best run companies where people really like to work. They've got incredible retention rates, they're incredibly productive, and it aligns 100% with diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives. So to me, that's evidence. That's what we call data validation, right? And so people often don't think that way. But what you're talking about is exactly that example, and I'll add another to it. I present a lot right now, much more virtually, but often in person, it's coming back. And recommendations for keynote speaking, they're like, use ten slides maximum. And I'm like, no, because I know a lot of people aren't great with only if you're a speaker of an oral language, it doesn't mean that you're great with only auditory comprehension.

And so when I have an important thing to say, those words are on the slide in big letters, high contrast font, black and dark blue on a white background. And people can read them as I'm saying them because those are my punctuation points. So back in early rap and 80s rap, it would be where everybody comes in and says the thing and then you go back to the one person, right? It's kind of doing like a little Beastie Boys moment here. But people are very grateful. People are like, I really understood you in a way that I don't understand a lot of other presenters because I'm thinking about and so many people use closed captions now, right. People have gotten very used to streaming with closed captions because that extra bit of information for language is helping their language processing. So, by the way, what you talked about sounds for me, I can be anxious coming into a new space and everything you said, I'm like, oh, that sounds amazing for coming into a meeting and already knowing where I'm going to sit and stand and I can come in and what's happening next. That's the best.

Yeah. And the feedback, the quiet room. There were people who just wanted quiet. They didn't want to talk to anybody. I'm a self confessed and out and open introvert. I can do an hour or so. I can go full max for an hour, then I need the recharge. So I'll just go and lock myself away.

It's nice. You haven't got to justify yourself or say to people, I don't want to speak. Everyone knows if you're in the room, you don't speak. You just have your own little space. Play a bit of Candy Crush or something on your phone, do whatever you're going to do, just cheque out. And it really is powerful. I picking up on what you say about slides. There's a kind of a thing around professional speakers, about true professional speakers don't need slides, they just stand up on stage and it's the power of their voice, the storytelling, and yeah, great, brilliant.

But I'm a great believer also in, as you said, there are people in the audience who will zone out. English is not their primary language. They'll forget what you're saying or they miss something. I'm the same, actually. I was listening to some talks at this conference last week, and one person was working through this exercise and they had this model called Soap. Soap. And they give a little card. You're supposed to write this little thing down on the card.

Then you had to tick at the end of it. Whether it was an S, whether it's no, whether it's a whether it was a P. And I kind of zoned out in this talk because I was so engrossed in what this person was saying and my mind was exploding in different directions. I got to the end, he says, Right, now, I want you to do this. I thought okay. And there's nothing on the card that says what Soap means. His slide had gone and I'm going, so I don't know what I can't remember what it stands for. So I went out to ask and said, look, if you're going to commit these cards, put it on the back, put it on your slide, do something.

Because people like me who zone out then realise at the end they need to learn what they should missed, can't go back. And another speaker did the same. She had an ABCDE model and she put a and she put a list of things under the A, then she put a list of things under the B. But when she clicked on the B, the A ones disappeared. I assisted at the end, I said Brilliant. But I zoned out. It wasn't until I got to the end of the E that I suddenly thought, I wonder what I said. I wanted to go back, it's too late.

So I couldn't go back to the A's. I said, what would be better if kind of thing is instead of blanket out, just grey it out until you have a bright and a dark. So you've taken the focus off of it. But for me, I can just go back and go, oh yeah, I remember, because my attention span just doesn't hold that long. And I learned that about myself last weekend, that I was zoning out. It wasn't because I wasn't paying attention, it's because what they said sparked me. All these things were firing off and I didn't know how to come back.

I mean, I wouldn't even call it zoning out, which feels a little too self deprecating to me. I think it's more that they didn't signal to you that this was a thing you were going to have to retain, right? They didn't signal to you, here's a thing, I need you to take this away. And it's too much for people who are so I'll tell you. I'm a professional linguist. I learned two languages from my dissertation, like learned in my twenty s two languages, and then went to Russia for a year and studied how one language was affecting the other in all these different ways, right? And I cannot learn things without visual cues. I would have to write down if there was a new word, I would have to write it down. I remember one time I was with my parents on what's called Navajo reservation, but they prefer the term Dine. And so we were talking and we were supposed to visit a hogan with an elder and I wanted to speak respectfully and I said, can you teach me a few things to say to be respectful? And they said them and I'm like, uh oh.

And I found a scrap of paper and a pen and I said, Please tell me again. And then I wrote it down using a phonetic alphabet, and then I was able to say it. But as a professional linguist, a professional language, learner in some respect without a visual cue, I couldn't even do it. And I would say the same about song lyrics. I couldn't tell you what any song is about if it's just going in order. If I don't see it all in one place on a piece of paper, then I'm like, oh, that's what the song is about. But I'm a native speaker of English and some people enunciate well, and I couldn't tell you what almost any song is actually talking about. So I think that for many of us who are processing, if you're processing things through time, if there's temporal distance, that there isn't the same kind of retention, if something is gathered for you with a different kind of input written and you can see it synthesised all in one place.

So I reject your zoning out and say that I would say that you were doing what's natural for an engaged audience member, and there needed to be supplemental things if somebody really wanted you to take something and turn it into active knowledge on your behalf.

Yeah, I take your charitable definition and I agree with you. So absolutely, I was using zoning out as my kind of shortcut to how I would describe, but you're right, I was probably acting very typical in that until I need to remember something or until I know I need to remember something, I probably don't. You have to punctuate and say this next word is worth remembering. It's the other thing, isn't it? If someone says, Would you like a cup of coffee, Steven? You don't hear, Would you like a cup of coffee? Until the word Steven is used. So if you say, Steven, would you like a cup of coffee? You know that whatever's going to come next is an instruction or a question or something for you. So it's about making sure you cite I think you said it earlier say something as a warm up before you want to say the main point. Otherwise you got to get people back on the page. Right? I'm going to say something really interesting now, and this is it, okay, I'm back in the room.

And I think that's what you're trying to say there is you got to give the people that audible or visual cue, the next thing that follows is for you.

Yeah. And so what I think is also interesting, let me bring it back to inclusive communication in a less hey, if you're a speaker, do these things. Although I completely agree. A lot of people don't get good training in how to speak to people, and then it shows. But bringing it back to inclusive language, there are people who are worried that they're going to sound very woke or not on brand if they use more inclusive substitutes. Right? So I'm on retainer for a financial services company, and they send me things, and so they're like, well, what would you do? And I'm like, but my brand is inclusion, so what's correct for me isn't like, I see you as three years, five years behind me, right? Like, there's stuff that I'm using now that five years from now is okay for you to use, but I think it's too soon for you to use now, given who your audience is. They got 23 million customers or something, right? So I'm like, let's be more cautious. For example, I say to people, like, well, I don't want to sound woke.

And I'm like, but you don't have to sound woke to be inclusive. So one thing is here's an important term. Terminological precision is a thing that I said during my book launch a few weeks ago, and a few people came up. So when I'm talking about inclusion language, I'm saying I want you to be precise. And there are times that you're saying things that are actually imprecise. So let's move it to the more precise thing. If you're saying husband and wife, that's imprecise, because there are people who don't fit in those categories. You think you've included everybody who's legally bound to another person in a romantic relationship.

And I'm here to say you have been imprecise and you've forgotten people, right? So terminological precision. So people, for example, think that guys includes everybody. And I'm here to tell you that there are semantic tests that show yes for the listener. Joanne is shaking her head saying, Guys, it does not include so. But there are people who are very resistant. And they say to me, guys includes everybody. And I'll say, okay. So I'm going to a bathroom, the loo, as it were, in a restaurant, and I am female, assigned female at birth, female to this day.

And the first bathroom door that I see, because I'm here in the US. Says, guys, do I walk into that bathroom and think it's gender inclusive, or do I walk down the hall and look for a bathroom door that says gals or dolls or girls? I'm not walking into the guy's bathroom because I know it's a bathroom designated for people who are understood to be male, right? So I say you don't have to sound super hippie dippy or California woke or whatever. If you say so every time you're going to say guys. Like, let's say you're a manager running a meeting, and every time you're going to say, hey, guys. All right, you guys, all right, guys, let's move to this. I said, you can just switch it up. You don't have to use the same thing. So you can start by saying, hey, everyone, let's start.

And okay, team, you did a great job. Okay, folks, let's move on. And he said, you know who's noticed? Nobody's noticed. Nobody's paying attention to the fact nobody's going to. But you know who's eventually going to notice? Like, your non binary or female team members who suddenly realise that they like when they're in a meeting with somebody else who's saying guys all the time, they're like, oh. They're like, oh, mike never says guys, right? So it's going to be some sort of retroactive credit you're going to get, but they're going to just feel better. And to my mind, that's the majority of inclusive language. It's not designed to signal how good a person you are.

It's designed to have set things up for comfort, just like all of those careful things to talk you. Through to talk an attendee through what the meeting was going to be. It's the same thing for all of the interactions, whether they're one on one, a meeting, all hands, meeting speech, an email to the entire company, et cetera, a slack communication to everybody. That's why I say communication and language and a set of practises rather than focusing on words.

Yeah, for sure. What I've found is you can just put the full stop earlier in the sentence. So instead of good morning, sir. Good evening, sir, you just put the full stop after good evening or Good morning. It's easy, just don't say anymore. Because our natural politeness, maybe as an English speaker, our natural politeness is we want to sort of use this familiarity terms, but if you just say good morning, good afternoon, or how are we doing? Everything okay with you today? Good morning, everybody. Hi, everybody, great to see you here, team. Those kind of things are really great ways you say a number of times I'm standing on the platform at train station and they say, ladies and gentlemen, the train now arriving at platform two is for Cardiff.

You go, what about my friend? Where are they going to go? You're not talking to them. Every time a speaker or people are here uses the phrase ladies and gentlemen, I always think all the people is excluding or. If you have a slide where you're putting stats and demographics and you've just got male and female on it, you think, well, even if people who are non binary or gender nonconforming are so insignificantly represented on the statistic, have you stopped you having a column showing zero to at least you've thought about it. And what I always say to people is if you try Googling, do a Google Image search for guys. If you think guys are gender neutral, do a Google Image search and tell me how many people don't appear to be men in swimsuits on the first five pages. Most of them are men in swimsuits on the first five pages.

An intriguing result. What I also say is another example I like to give it. We call it a semantic test or heuristic right. So what can you go through and test and see what's the gender reference involved is? Two coworkers, one's moved there recently, and they're both male and they're both straight. And one says to the other, so how many guys have you dated since you moved to town? Right, I know it can be hard to meet people here. It's a small town. Is that like a regular thing to say? Does this person of course it doesn't invoke dating everybody. So a nice example I like to give them.

Let's just get historical here. How does it feel when a word has genuinely changed the gender of the kind of person it refers to? Let's use the word girl. So it's 1350, and I say girl, and then I say things in English that whatever, I'm not going to try. But so I'm speaking in 1350 English and I use girl, and if I write girl, I spell it with a Y and I point to two people. One of them appears to be a young male person and one appears to be a young female person. I can be referring to either because girl in 1350 refers to boys and girls. It is gender agnostic. It is what people claim guys is.

Girl is absolutely referring to anyone who is a young person. So sometimes you can say girl and mean somebody who is a young male person. But cut to there was a gender shift and so now it refers only to young female people. So we know what it feels like when a word has genuinely changed the reference of its gender, because nobody's going to say girl and think of young male people. Although we're being more careful with gender now. Right, but anyway, but oh, look at that group of girls over there. And it's a group of boys playing football or whatever. Right.

And I meant soccer. So anyway, I like that counterpoint. Does guys feel like it's shifted all the way? No. Absolutely. Will it shift in the future? Possibly. Semantic shift is a thing you can look back on, but you can't look.

Forward at it's most prevalent here in restaurants, the meet and greeter tends to say, hi, guys, can I get you a table? And it's kind of I don't want to make any stereotypical accusation here, but it seems to be imported from North America as a kind of a cultural thing. And in the UK, we kind of picked up on it and it's as bad as I mean, I'm not a big fan of folk or folk and high folks and things like that. That's kind of again, it's like forced English. You have to try and make the language sound natural and inclusive without it being, as you say, woke or deliberately inclusive, just naturally inclusive.

I think that's I don't see folks, you know, people write to me and they're do I or they ask a question, what do I do about sir and ma'am? Especially people in the American South or people, black Americans are often raised that they have to say sir or ma'am. And I'm like, OOH, we don't have one yet. I'm like, I'm waiting for the young people to come up with a gender neutral alternative. But we don't have one, I said. So you got to maybe do politeness and tone. So if you're going to walk up to somebody on the street, so if there's somebody you know is male and wants to be called sir, then fine, there's someone you know is female and wants to be called ma'am, then fine, or madam, right? But if there's somebody you don't know on the street or the next client or the next customer, you can't do it. So you have to use it. Well, you were saying good morning, right? Instead of sir, just drop it off, right? And you can just say, oh, excuse me.

Like, you can try to do it in tone or you can say, oh, I think the person in the green shirt was next. Or instead of saying, Hi, guys, you can say hello, everyone, folks doesn't feel natural for me at all. For some people it's a very natural word. For me it feels very artificial. So I recommend that people use it if it feels good in their mouth, but if it doesn't feel good, dump it like that's. Okay. There's plenty of other things to say.

It's funny you said that. Describe someone as the person over there in the green shirt. I tend to wear a hat. I've got a couple of hats, different coloured hats. I tend to wear those when I'm at events and speaking and things like that. Because I want to give somebody an easy way to describe me rather than get confused by my gender identity or use my obvious characteristic as a description. The trans woman over there or something, I give them the lady in the hat or the person in the hat, or the person with the yellow tights, or something like that. So I try and give people a very easy way of recognising me and spotting me when I walk in the door as part of my personal brand.

So it does help sometimes to signpost yourself in a way you like to be signposted.

But I think it's an excellent example of the extra labour that people have to do in order to make sure they're treated well. I think about all the black women I know straightening their hair, for example, or all the work that people do in order to make sure that's your labour to prevent negative things being said, like you're helping people out, but it's also protection for yourself because you've made it easier through your labour. But I long for a world where people already have very fluent ways of referring to a person that they don't have to go right to gender identity and already are thinking maybe gender identity isn't relevant to how I describe a person. Right.

On that note, it's been an amazing hour having a chat with you and obviously the 20 or 30 minutes beforehand in the green room where we just got to know each other. Suzanne Wertheim, tell me about your book. Tell me about how people can get in contact with you because I know the listeners of this show would love to make contact. So what's the best way of getting in touch?

Sure. So you can find the book. The book is called The Inclusive Language Field Guide. It is available all the places books are sold, including if you're in the UK, there are a few bookshops there that are stocking it in person. Paperback. It is a paperback it is an ebook. And if you thought I have a nice voice, you can listen to it for 7 hours and 56 minutes, narrating the audiobook. Although I do have to warn you, there is a table at the end that I read for 30 minutes.

So the audiobook might not be the best might not be the best option. So if you want to find me, the best way to find me is Suzannewortheim.com. If you want to connect with me, you can contact me there. You can sign up for my free newsletter, which I send out twice a month. Once a month, I send out an inclusive language article about something often topical. And once a month I send out an advice column so you can write to me and get free advice. It's fully anonymized. And people I recently covered sir and Ma'am, for example, and people like, I don't know what to do.

And people also like to follow me on LinkedIn because I do write articles on topical things. They're often topical in the US, but sometimes they're topical on a more global level. So I will give the analysis and show the patterns that people aren't seeing or give the names for things. Oh, this is an example of inflating language. When the white basketball player did it, nobody complained. And when the black basketball player did it, there was an outrage on Twitter. And so that's a double standard using what I call inflating language, et cetera. So, website LinkedIn and all bookstores.

Absolutely. Also, as you were talking there, I nipped onto Amazon, into Audible, and I just purchased your book using one of my Audible credits. So that'll be something I can listen to on the train. So I'm looking forward to that. Having chatted for an hour, I'm really intrigued to get into the nitty gritty in the weeds of this to find out more about it. So, no, absolutely fantastic.

Lovely. And I read it slow because there's a good number of linguistic concepts and sometimes people take time. So if you need to speed it up, it's read slow enough that it works okay. For 1.25 speed, I believe.

Okay.

I was very deliberate in the speed because I know that when people have new concepts, sometimes it just takes a while. You just need a little more time to hear that new word.

Yeah, we've picked up on my terminology about zoning out. Sometimes when I'm on audiobooks, I find myself zoning out or hyper focusing on the previous thing, and then I have to stop it, rewind and go back again because I realise I haven't listened to about five minutes worth. So, yeah, I do regularly rewind and play them at different speeds or pick my moments. So I'll enjoy that. So thank you very much.

I love it. Well, thank you again. This has just been such a pleasure and such a nice conversation. I really, genuinely enjoyed it.

Thank you. And obviously. Thank you to you, the listener. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Thank you for getting to the end. I really appreciate that. Of course, if you're not already subscribed, please do subscribe to keep updates on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites podcast.

That's B-I-T-E-S. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues, share the love, share the episode. I've got a number of other exciting guests lined up over the next few weeks and months. And, of course, if you'd like to be a guest, please let me know. I'd welcome any feedback or suggestions to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. let me know how we can improve the show, if that's possible. Finally. My name is Joanne Lockwood.

It's been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.