Build Trust, Navigate Change: What marital-status titles can teach organisations about inclusion

National Inclusion Week 2026 takes place from 14th–20th September, with this year’s theme: ‘Build Trust. Navigate Change’.

National Inclusion Week was founded by Inclusive Employers in 2013, initially as a small event encouraging its members to engage with inclusion in their workplaces. More than a decade later, it has grown into a campaign involving thousands of organisations and reaching millions through social media.

That history is worth remembering because the purpose of National Inclusion Week has always been about turning inclusion into something organisations do, rather than something they simply say.

The 2026 theme, ‘Build Trust. Navigate Change’, provides a useful opportunity for employers to look beyond the big, visible elements of an inclusion strategy and consider the small, everyday systems that shape whether people actually experience an organisation as inclusive.

One example is something that can easily be dismissed as insignificant: marital-status titles.

Why does a company need to know whether a woman is married before deciding how to address her? Why should an employee, customer or job applicant have to select between Miss, Mrs or Ms when a man’s marital status does not determine whether he is addressed as Mr?

And, perhaps most importantly, what does it say about an organisation when its systems still require people to provide information that is unnecessary for the service being provided?

Trust is built in the small moments

The CIPD describes employee voice as the way people communicate their views to their employer and influence matters that affect them. Its current guidance identifies employee voice as one of the seven dimensions of job quality and notes that effective voice can contribute to building trust, innovation, productivity and organisational improvement.

That has an important implication for inclusion.

Trust isn’t created simply because an organisation publishes an inclusion statement or runs an annual campaign. It is built through the everyday experience of dealing with an employer: whether people are listened to, whether their preferences are respected, whether mistakes are acknowledged and whether systems make sense for the people who use them.

Marital-status titles are a good example.

If an organisation asks someone to select a title, it is asking them to categorise themselves before they can progress through a form or service. For some people, that categorisation may feel entirely unremarkable. For others, it can be inaccurate, intrusive or simply unnecessary.

GoTitleFree’s research, based on surveys and interviews with a cross-section of nearly 2,000 people, found that 68% of women surveyed said organisations got their title wrong fairly regularly or very often. It also found that 71% said they would be put off buying a product or service if they were addressed incorrectly. Among the non-binary people surveyed, 92% said they felt titles were not necessary in any situation.

These are campaign findings rather than nationally representative statistics, but they offer employers a useful indication of the potential customer and employee experience created by restrictive title systems.

That matters because a seemingly tiny administrative error can communicate something much bigger: our system doesn’t really recognise you.

The population has changed. Have our forms changed with it?

The latest ONS figures provide another reason for employers to review whether their systems still reflect the people they serve.

In England and Wales in 2025, 51.1% of people aged 18 and over were married or civil partnered, down from 52.3% in 2015. Meanwhile, 34.9% had never married or entered a civil partnership, compared with 32.6% in 2015. The proportion living together without ever having formed a legal partnership also increased, from 9.8% in 2015 to 10.8% in 2025.

There is no suggestion here that being married is unusual. It isn’t. But the data does demonstrate that people’s relationships and living arrangements are not neatly captured by traditional assumptions about marriage.

And employers increasingly understand that good people practice means designing systems around people’s actual experiences rather than expecting people to fit outdated systems.

That is where ‘Navigate Change’ becomes particularly relevant.

Removing titles is a small change with a clear rationale

Going title free does not require an organisation to launch a major transformation programme.

In many cases, the change could be remarkably simple:

• Remove title fields from recruitment and HR forms.
• Remove titles from customer registration forms.
• Review email templates and databases that automatically insert/ request titles.
• Ask people how they would like to be addressed where an address is genuinely required.
• Make first name and surname sufficient.
• Check that removing titles does not break legacy systems or integrations.
• Communicate the change clearly to employees and customers.

The important question is not ‘Which title should we add?’

It is ‘Do we need a title at all?’

That distinction matters.

Adding Mx to a drop-down, for example, may provide another option, but it doesn’t necessarily address the underlying issue. It can simply make an already unnecessary question slightly more inclusive… but unfortunately more confusing. Categorising and ‘othering’ people unnecessarily.

The more inclusive design is removing the question altogether.

Listen before you change

This is where employers can use the ‘Build Trust’ part of the National Inclusion Week theme.

Don’t assume that HR, IT or customer-service teams know how a title field affects everyone. Ask.

Employee and customer voice can provide a practical way of doing this. The CIPD emphasises that meaningful employee voice requires people to be able to express their views and for those views to influence decisions.

An business could therefore ask:

• Where do we currently ask for titles?
• Why do we ask for them?
• What purpose does the information serve?
• What happens if someone chooses a title that doesn’t reflect how they wish to be addressed?
• Have employees or customers ever told us that our system has got their title wrong?
• Could we achieve the same business outcome without asking the question?

These are useful questions because they move the conversation away from whether somebody personally likes titles and towards something much more practical: does the organisation REALLY need the data?

In eight years of GoTitleFree campaigning, we haven’t found a single reason why organisations can justify asking for a title.

Inclusion means making change happen

National Inclusion Week began with a simple idea: encouraging organisations to engage with inclusion. Thirteen years later, its theme asks employers to consider how they build trust and navigate change.

Marital-status titles offer a surprisingly practical test.

• Listen to employees and customers.
• Identify the barrier.
• Understand why it exists.
• Change the process.
• Check whether the change has worked.
• …Then keep listening.

That is how organisations navigate change without leaving people behind.

A practical National Inclusion Week challenge

So, this National Inclusion Week, employers could set themselves a simple challenge:

Find one system that asks people to identify something about themselves that the organisation doesn’t actually need to know… and remove the question.

Marital status titles are an excellent place to start.

Because when an organisation stops asking someone to declare whether they are Miss, Mrs, Ms, Mx, Mr or Dr… it sends a simple message:

“We don’t need to categorise you in order to respect you.”

That is a small operational change.

But it can also be a powerful demonstration of trust.

And perhaps that is what good inclusion looks like in 2026: not simply asking people to trust that we mean well, but designing our workplaces, systems and services so that they have good reason to believe it in their hearts.

Stella Sutcliffe

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GoTitleFree™ has been celebrating businesses who have gone ‘title free’ for eight years.

We have created toolkits for businesses to use who want to explore the various ways to ensure gender inclusive language in customer service and communication practices.

We also have a petition for any person who wishes to add their name to our list of supporters.

To all of our existing supporters, keep fighting the ‘title free’ fight!