Is your site gender-neutral? This UP tool has the answer

Gendered terms are a thing of the past. Still, it isn’t shocking to see that some websites still have a proclivity for certain non-gender-neutral terms (see: “chairman,” “salesman” and “stewardess”). One way to check if your fave site passes with flying colors? The UP-produced “Equal Writes.”

Made by digital agency AmpLab in partnership with the UP Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, Equal Writes is a tool that determines if your site is “equally written.” How it’s actually determined will be based on “Gender-Fair Language: A Primer,” which was published by the UP Center and professor Dr. Thelma Kintanar.

Once a user has entered the site’s URL, the tool will give it a “gender fairness score,” along with some suggestions on how to make it more gender-neutral.

However, there’s a catch: Equal Writes only scans gendered terms as they are, so it won’t really keep context in mind. Plus, there are also cases of phantom words that aren’t found in the article itself, which could drop your score down a couple of notches. Of course, it’s a WIP, and just like all WIPs, it comes with a few glitches—fortunately, future updates could soon mend them.

To try it out for yourself, head to Equal Writes.

Art by Yel Sayo