Week 9 - Appropriate and Sensitive Language

I think a lot of students have had their eyes opened this semester on all the many little mistakes we make in our day to day writing. This week was no different as I realized that I generally generalize with masculine language. I swear it's not on purpose ladies.
I work at The Home Depot's online contact center as a Supervisor, and because of that I send out many emails to my team. This is where I became aware of the first mistake I have been making frequently, which involves the sexism section. When I write an email to my team, I often will start it with, "Hey Guys." I have both men and woman on my team, but this is just how I've always addressed them. Since going over the section I've changed my opening to, "Hey Team."
The other of these that I found I have an issue with is regarding heterosexism, and more specifically the concept that not everyone is heterosexual. I know that their are many people I come across who must identify as being gay or lesbian, but I just think about it in my writing or communication. We had a work party recently, and when communicating, I advised people that they were welcome to bring their husband or wife, but after going over this section, I know now that the best way to phrase this in the future is to say, "significant other."
I didn't actually find a specific example out in the world that shows these issues, but I did find a really interesting article that shows how sexism is being shown in the world of sports.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/03/sport/sexism-sport-rio-olympic-games/index.html
Hope you find it as interesting as I did! They analyzed over 160 million words from decades of newspapers, academic papers, tweets and blogs, and the study finds men are three times more likely than women to be mentioned in a sporting context, while women are disproportionately described in relation to their marital status, age or appearance.