71: Using gender sensitive communications as a tool to build an inclusive culture

71: Using gender sensitive communications as a tool to build an inclusive culture: The language we use often reflects the widely accepted socio-cultural values, norms, and beliefs that society holds, including roles men/women and non binary people play. For as long as we know language has been used to undermine people making them seem less competent, confident and places an expectations on what people can aspire too. The constant use of such language reinforces assumptions.

E.g. Assumptions that all members of a category (Director) share a gender or that all members of a gender share a characteristic (women prefer to look after children)

E.g. Using gendered pronouns/nouns when you don’t know the gender or using he/him/man as the default

However, language can also be used as powerful tool to help reshape culture and challenge stereotypes. In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Parijat Ghosh and Souparno Chatterjee from PRADAN on the journey and learnings from the past 10 months to building a more equitable and inclusive organisation.

I am super proud to have been invited by PRADAN to support the organisations in unravelling the layers and discovering who they are as an organisation and the gap that exists with who they aspire to be. In the last 10 months, I have run numerous workshops, listening exercises, audits, and had people share 100s of examples on how our culture, upbringing, the books we read, the movies we see, our lived experiences colour our usage of language.

We are nearly at the end of the discovery phase, the next phase will be about mindfulness, and putting all the learning into action - in how we use language to engage with our peer group, with teams, with people on the field, the communities we work with, donors, governments, in the manner in which we write our reports. The measure of success is not that everyone will suddenly be inclusive, but that most people are conscious of the impact of their words, are willing to learn and build an inclusive organisation.

And most importantly it is important to remember that language is not static, it changes and evolves every single day; like it has done since the start of spoken language many moons ago.

Want to know more about the why and what of the gender sensitive communications initiative at PRADAN - listen here