Sans Gender
Writing a gender equal future through embedded code
Writing a gender equal future through embedded code
In a world where gender equality is increasingly falling off the agenda due to right wing politics, disinformation and a cacophony of issues, the need for ways to address gender bias is needed more than ever.
Language and written culture plays a big part in how we form our views of the world. We created a tool that intercepts that bias at the point at which it enters the world, the written word, developing a typeface that challenges us to think about our bias while helping to remove it as the user types.
Sans Gender is a sans serif typeface inspired by the suffragette movement. It is a family that consists of 8 weights – thin through to extrabold and has a full set of glyphs. The real magic though is in the code that sits within the OpenType functionality of the font’s glyphs. By identifying over 100 gendered terms and hard coding them into the typeface, Sans Gender is able to pick up on a needlessly gendered term as it is being typed and seamlessly swap it for a pre-rendered inclusive term.
We have released the code for anyone to use. The potential for Sans Gender is to be integrated into any and every typeface that exists. By creating a scalable open source code our ambition is for everyone to take the idea and play with it, adapting it for their local language, as well as adding to the bank of words that exist in the code.
As an industry that is at the intersection of culture and communication, Sans Gender is perfectly positioned to create the impact that it can have on gender bias across all communication and arts industries.