The two correct formats for pronouns in an email signature, how to add them in Gmail / Outlook / Apple Mail, and the placement gotchas that break in ATS, recruiting tools, and multi-language teams.
The MailSigCraft Team
MailSigCraft
Adding pronouns to your email signature is a 5-second edit, but the question that actually trips people up is where to put them. Inline with your name? On their own line? Before or after the title? In parentheses, brackets, or after a slash? The format you pick affects how the signature reads on a phone, whether it survives an ATS, and whether it looks polished or stapled-on.
This guide covers the two formats that actually work, the four placement gotchas that quietly break signatures, how to set them up in Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail, and the team-rollout pattern so a 200-person company isn't shipping 200 different formats.
If you only want the recommended format and not the reasoning:
Jane Smith (she/her)
Senior Designer, Acme
jane@acme.com · acme.com
Pronouns sit in parentheses immediately after the name, before any role or contact lines. That's the format that reads cleanly on mobile, survives ATS parsing, and matches what most companies that have standardized on this have landed on. The two-line "separate row" format works too — keep reading for when to pick which.
The most common pattern across companies that have rolled this out at scale (Microsoft, Salesforce, the US federal government's draft guidance). One line, scans naturally, no extra vertical real estate on mobile.
Use this unless you have a specific reason not to.
Jane Smith
she/her · Senior Designer, Acme
If your name line already runs long — long name, hyphenated last name, professional credentials (Dr. Jane Smith, PhD) — the parentheses can crowd the signature. Drop pronouns to the next line, separated from the role with a thin divider.
Putting pronouns next to the name AND on a separate row reads as overcorrection. Pick one and apply it consistently — especially across a team rollout.
The setting path is the same path you'd use to change any signature — the pronouns are part of the signature text, not a separate field.
Settings (gear icon) → See all settings → General → Signature. Find your signature in the editor and add (she/her) immediately after your name. Save changes at the bottom of the page. The new format applies to every email you send going forward.
For mobile Gmail, the signature is set per-device: Menu → Settings → tap your account → Signature settings → Mobile signature. Add the pronouns line there too, or the signature on phone replies will be inconsistent with desktop.
Outlook web: Settings (gear) → Mail → Compose and reply → Signature. Edit, add pronouns, save.
Outlook desktop (new Outlook): Settings → Accounts → Signatures. Same edit flow.
Outlook desktop (classic): File → Options → Mail → Signatures. The change applies to new emails AND replies separately — check both dropdowns.
Mail → Settings → Signatures. Select the account, edit the signature, paste or type the new line with pronouns. Mail applies the change immediately to the next email you compose.
Settings → Apps → Mail → Signature. The iOS Signature field is plain-text only, so type the pronouns inline. If you have a formatted HTML desktop signature, you'll need to re-paste the full signature from desktop using the email-to-self trick — see our iPhone signature guide for that workflow.
These are the patterns that break signatures silently — no error, just a worse-looking result on the recipient's end.
If you're sending email from a job-application context — recruiters, hiring managers, HR — some legacy Applicant Tracking Systems parse incoming email signatures into structured contact fields. Several of them (older Taleo, older iCIMS, some Workday versions before 2024) interpret parentheses as metadata and either strip the contents or treat Jane Smith (she/her) as the full name field, sending Jane Smith (she/her) to the recruiter's profile system.
The fix: in job-application contexts specifically, drop pronouns to a separate line below the name with a clear separator like Pronouns: she/her. ATS systems treat the labeled-field format more predictably than parentheses. For everyday work email this isn't a problem — only switch formats when you're actively applying.
Outlook's name autocomplete (the dropdown of suggested recipients) sometimes indexes signature lines and uses them to autocomplete addresses. If your signature reads Jane Smith she/her, Outlook can occasionally surface Jane Smith she as a suggested recipient name when someone types your first name in the To field. The slash gets misread as a separator.
The fix: keep the slash inside parentheses — Jane Smith (she/her) — and Outlook treats the parenthesized chunk as a non-name annotation. This is also why (she/her) is more reliable than (she / her) with spaces around the slash; the no-space form parses as a single token in more tools.
For multi-language teams or anyone with non-English correspondence, English pronouns don't carry meaning in many target languages. (she/her) in an email to a Spanish or French recipient reads as untranslated technical jargon, not as the social signal you intended. In Japanese, Korean, or Mandarin business correspondence, pronoun signaling is culturally read differently and can land as overly informal.
The fix: if your signature ships in multiple languages (different signatures per locale, or a multi-language stack), translate the pronouns alongside the rest of the signature: (ella) in Spanish, (elle) in French gender-neutral, (sie) in German. For business correspondence with markets where pronoun signaling isn't established, consider dropping the line entirely on locale-specific signatures rather than transliterating.
Most pronouns sit safely inside ASCII (she/her, he/him, they/them, xe/xem, ze/zir). But unusual sets that include slashes around multiple pronouns (she/they, he/they) can get auto-formatted by some email clients into hyperlinks or auto-corrected by aggressive autocorrect on iOS and Android keyboards mid-typing.
The fix: type the pronouns once at the desktop signature level and never edit them on a mobile keyboard. If autocorrect rewrites she/they to She/They (capitalized) or to something else mid-edit, undo immediately rather than retyping. For dual-pronoun sets, the cleanest format is she/they or (she/they) — keep it inside one slash, not multiple delimiters.
Dr. Jane Margaret Smith-Johnson, PhD, MBA (she/her/hers)
Too many parenthetical chunks, too long for mobile width, the pronouns get lost in the credential soup. Either drop pronouns to a new line or simplify the credentials.
Jane Smith
Senior Designer
Acme Corp
(she/her)
Putting pronouns on the fourth line, alone, separated from the name reads as a stapled-on disclaimer instead of part of your identity. Move them next to the name or onto the same line as the title.
Jane Smith (she/her)
Senior Designer, Acme
jane@acme.com
Reads as one identity block. Mobile-friendly, scans top-to-bottom cleanly, survives ATS, no extra height on small screens. This is the default.
For a 50+ person team, the cleanest rollout is a master template with pronouns as an optional field in the signature builder — opt-in per employee, not mandatory. This sidesteps the "forcing employees to disclose" concern, keeps everyone's signature visually consistent (same format, same placement), and lets HR enforce the company-wide style without enforcing the content. MailSigCraft's Team plan handles this with a single brand-enforced template and per-employee toggles.
Adding pronouns is the default for most modern workplaces, but there are contexts where the right move is to skip the line. These aren't reasons to oppose the practice — they're situations where the line adds noise without adding signal.
Before you assume the change actually shipped:
Send a test email to yourself, open it on phone AND desktop. Confirm the pronouns sit on the right line, in the right format, on both screen sizes — mobile width is where line-break issues show up.
Check both new emails and replies separately. Outlook and Apple Mail can use different signatures for each — verify pronouns are in both.
Mobile devices: re-check after iOS or Android updates. The Signature field on iOS Mail occasionally reverts to plain text after major updates; replies will look different than what you expected.
Pronouns in a signature take one line and 8–12 characters. They're easy to dismiss as performative or skip as low-priority. The reason they're worth getting right — format, placement, consistency — is that an email signature is one of the most-repeated artifacts you ship: a 200-person company sends hundreds of thousands of emails a year, each one carrying the same signature block. A format that reads as deliberate and well-considered compounds; one that reads as stapled-on or inconsistent does the opposite.
Pick one format. Apply it consistently. Verify it on mobile. That's the whole job.
If you're rolling pronouns out across a team — not just updating your own signature — the work is less about format and more about distribution. Email signatures drift fast: someone copies an old signature, someone else edits theirs on their phone, a new hire pastes whatever template they had at their last job. Within six months you have four different formats live.
MailSigCraft handles the team-rollout case directly: one master template with pronouns as an opt-in field, brand-enforced styling, and the same signature shipped to every employee's Gmail / Outlook / Apple Mail account. Individual employees can opt in or skip the field without breaking the company-wide format.
Dr. Jane Smith-Johnson, PhD
she/her · Director of Research, Acme
When the name line is already long, put pronouns alongside the role with a dot or pipe separator. Still one logical "identity block," not floating.
For team rollouts, sample-check 5–10 random employee signatures. Even with a master template, employees can override locally; spot-check before assuming the company-wide format is consistent.