Gendered Content Alignment
CONTENT AUDITS / COENTENT REVISIONS / GENDER CONTENT TRAINING | CONSULTATION
The way your organization talks to and about its stakeholders impacts the quality of services you are able to provide. Do your student registration forms ask for "Mom" and "Dad" when you mean "Who makes decisions for this child"? Do your medical intake forms ask about gender when you're really trying to understand what might be going on with their body and physical health in terms of organs and hormones?
I offer a range of content strategy services to ensure that your communications materials reflect and respect the humanity and diversity of the people you need to reach. Thoughtful and strategic design of forms, databases, and promotional materials allow you to collect the information you really need to provide the best services to your clients.
Gendered Content Services
Here's an Example:
Organizations that provide services for children, such as childcare centers, preschools, summer camps, and doctor's offices are often rife with assumptions about a child's family, caregiving structure, and often use inaccurate and inflexible gender terms for children and parents. These forms cause endless frustration for LGBTQ parents and caregivers, but also for single parents, parents who receive significant support from extended families, or families with more than two parents providing active care.
These types of forms do more than frustrate and isolate families that differ from the married mom/dad pairings; they fail to get the information required to provide quality, affirming, and accurate care and services to children and their families.
AN ACTUAL PRESCHOOL FORM
A FORM ALIGNED TO CAPTURE WIDER CARE NETWORKS
The form on the left shows the way in which presumptions about a child's family relationships limit the accuracy of information a school might collect about a child's care providers. The form on the right contains slight changes that contain flexibility for a wide variety of families to tell you how they care for their child. Most forms that have gender indicators or ask about family makeup have limitations like the form on the left. They may use gender-limiting language in their materials, such as fertility services that market their materials only to women, or forms that ask if a student is male or female; these options focus narrowly on biology, not social groupings, and prevent transgender, nonbinary, or intersex students to fill out the information in any accurate way; at times materials using limiting language in this way discourage LGBTQ people from seeking services from the organization at all.