I’m a member of Toastmasters and I have been using an AI app called Yoodli when rehearsing my speeches. With Yoodli, you record your speech and it provides you with an AI analysis of the audio portion. (It does not analyze your gestures or body language, but you can watch yourself on video.) Yoodli lists ums and ahs, filler words, weak words, and non-inclusive words. It measures your speaking pace and indicates where you paused.
The non-inclusive word category is interesting because there are many words that we use without thinking about them. A few examples are grandfather clause, master bedroom, and blacklist/whitelist. Grandfather clause has a racial history; a better term would be legacy clause.
The real estate industry is moving away from the term master bedroom, again do to its racial past. The preferred term is now primary bedroom.
In the cybersecurity industry, blacklist and whitelist are being replaced with blocklist and allowlist.
These are just a few examples of non-inclusive words and they are so easy to use without thinking about them. Here are ten categories where language might be non-inclusive:
- Gender
- Race
- Age
- LGBTQ
- Physical Disability
- Mental Health
- Religion
- Immigration
- Elitism
- Former Felon
There are a lot of things to think about. So where do you start? If you are a subscriber to LinkedIn Learning, check out these courses: “Strategies to Foster Inclusive Language at Work” and “Using Gender Inclusive Language”.
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