This article explains how to use gender variables according to your company’s internal guidelines.

Creating Document Templates – Gender Variables

Create a new document in MS Office (DOCX/DOTX format) or OpenOffice (ODT/OTT format), and add the text that will be used as a base for the template.

Once you have done this, you will be able to add gender variables that will adapt automatically depending on the employee's gender.

In Personio, employees can choose between 4 different genders: Female, Male, Diverse and Undefined.

You can mark gender-specific alternatives in the document by adding them in the following format:

||Male|female|diverse|undefined||

Here can you see some examples:

||Dear Mr.|Dear Ms.|Hello {{first_name}}|Hello {{first_name}}||

||he|she|they|they||

||his|her|their|their||

As an example, if you added a Male/Female gender variable to a Word document, it would look like this: 

However, when uploading the same document into an employee's profile in Personio with their gender set as "Male", the document would look like this:

Keep in mind that gender-sensitive pronouns are harder to implement in some languages than others. In such cases, you can always completely rewrite the sentence to avoid the need for any pronoun at all (e. g., “{{first_name}} performed the tasks very efficiently” instead of “||he|she|they|they|| performed the tasks very efficiently”).

Read our article on Formatting Dates to find out more about creating document templates.