Sobhan Mohmand, Career Expert
4 Feb 2019
There used to be a time in which it was the common practice to include your gender on your CV, together with other personal information such as date of birth, marital status and nationality.
Over the past decade, however, this practice has almost completely disappeared.
New laws have been introduced to kerb discrimination in the workplace, and it has now become illegal for an employer to ask for your gender or sexuality on your CV or to discriminate against you during the hiring process based on your sex.
Moreover, in most cases, it doesn’t serve much of a purpose.
Consider the following example:
What is the purpose of Camilla mentioning her gender as “female” on her CV? It is plainly obvious from her name that she is a woman.
More reasons why you should include your gender on your CV:
Whenever the recruiters look through the CVs of applicants they are inevitably going to form mental images of the candidates. This is quite natural and something to be expected.
It could be useful to clarify your gender if you have a unisex name such as “Sam” or “Alex” because it might take the recruiter a bit off their feet when a woman walks in when they were actually expecting a man or vice versa!
What should you do in this case?
You have several options: