Edit: A lot of people seem to hate on the article without reading it.
Here is a supporting scientific source, by the same author: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666188825000863
The environmental impact of our online habits is far larger than most realize, and as digital communication continues to evolve, we must consider its long-term consequences on the environment and human life. We should take the easy steps of cutting wasteful energy use in our communications and it can start with eliminating email signatures.
This study is garbage and I suspect there is some culture war bullshit going on here.
This is directly from the study:
These are huge limitations. The metadata in an email header is often enormous! Significantly larger than most land acknowledgements and several orders of magnitude larger than listing preferred pronouns.
On top of that, email signatures are typically only found on emails that are letter-style communications that have been sent manually by a person. I think it’s dangerous to assume that the bulk of emails being sent are in that category. I believe the vast majority of emails sent are marketing style messages, with embedded style-sheets, headers and footers, and links to images if not the images themselves. All of this adds up to far outweigh the impact of listing ones pronouns.
After saying all that, the author of the study persists in saying that the results represent useful guidelines.
I am suspicious of the author and the website this is hosted on. Why would the author single out “pronouns” and “reputation signaling” as a problem here? They are claiming expertise in the area, but should know that they have picked a very small portion of a relatively small category of email. They are making claims about various numbers of people dying each year because of this “problem”. That’s a wild claim, designed to engage people emotionally instead of intellectually.