How to Turn on Pronouns in Microsoft 365 [he, him, she, her, they]

March 27, 2023
4 min read

Pronouns are quite popular nowadays, especially on LinkedIn, next to a name you can find he/him or she/her and so on. Do you know that you can turn on pronouns in Microsoft 365 as well? The ability to allow people in your organization to display their pronouns on the profile card is OFF by default for your tenant. If elected, after you have turned pronouns ON, it is optional for users to add pronouns to their profile.   
Pronouns will be shown next to the name in the top section of the profile card in Outlook on the web and Teams. Pronouns will be visible to everyone in your organization.   
 

In this article I'll walk you through every step to turn on this capability and how you can edit pronouns directly in Microsoft Teams; okay let's get started. First off let's open office.com in the browser in order to enable pronouns at tenant level, then over the left rail pane, let's click on admin. We're going to open the admin center; here, of course, you need admin rights.


It's time to expand the section settings on the left panel and down below, let's click on Org settings. Now in the search all settings field type pronouns to properly filter the capability to turn them on. A panel appears on the right and here you have a description about this feature. As you see in Figure 1, select the checkbox, Turn on and allow pronouns.

Turn on pronouns in the admin center
Figure 1: Turn on pronouns in the Admin center  |  Used with permission from Microsoft.

This effect takes a few hours to take effect. After the time passes, you can open your profile in Teams or Outlook to check if this capability is available.   
 

Now it's time to show you how you can set your pronouns on your profile. You have two ways to do that: You can set it across Teams or you can set it through Outlook on the web. Let's start with Microsoft Teams. In Teams, click on the profile picture and finally click on the name. This opens a card with the profile properties (Figure 2) and below the name you have a plus button:

Set Pronouns in Microsoft Teams
Figure 2:  In Microsoft Teams click your name to bring up profile properties, and then you'll see an option to set the pronoun.  |  Used with permission from Microsoft.

Now click + Pronouns. Another window opens up (Figure 3) and here there is a short description about pronouns and how it works. Finally in the textbox you can type whatever you want. Figure 3 shows some examples, but you can type what you want.

Type Your Pronouns In Teams
Figure 3: Add your pronouns in Teams.  |  Used with permission from Microsoft.

Once you set your pronouns, you'll see a preview. When ready, click the Save button. Now it's available to everyone in the organization.   
 

Figure 4 shows how it looks from a different user perspective.

Pronouns Visible Microsoft Teams
Figure 4:  Pronouns visible in Microsoft Teams  |  Used with permission from Microsoft.

 

Now let me show you how to use Outlook for the web to set pronouns for your profile. Open and log into Outlook for web. Here you can go over an email, for example, and hover over your name.

Open Profile Card In Outlook
Figure 5: Hover over your name to open your profile card In Outlook on the web.  |  Used with permission from Microsoft.

The profile card shows up (Figure 5) and here you have the pronouns label. If this is not available, you can click on the plus button like we have seen before. In the case you have already set the pronoun and you want to modify it, you have just to go on your pronouns and after clicking on it, you can modify and then save to apply your changes.

Giuliano De Luca

Giuliano De Luca

Giuliano is an Office Development MVP and specialist in Microsoft technologies for software design and development. He loves to collaborate with the community, Giuliano has passed several Microsoft certification exams and achieved the following certifications: MCSD SharePoint Applications, MCSD Web Applications, MCP, Microsoft Specialist Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Specialist.
In his free time, Giuliano loves to play and explore new technologies.

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