Feminists target German language as sexist

Austin Davis | Special to USA TODAY

BERLIN – Most Germans consider themselves in the vanguard of the gender equality movement. Exhibit A: Their female leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, has been in power for 13 years.

Women's rights advocates contend the reality is that women lag men in the workplace, and one of the biggest obstacles to their advancement is the sexist nature of the German language itself.

In English, a doctor is a doctor and a lawyer is a lawyer, regardless of whether that person is male or female. In German, professional titles and nouns reflect the gender of a person. A male doctor is an Arzt, and a female doctor is an Arztin. Most job vacancies use only male nouns, and the national anthem pays homage to the "Fatherland."

As the #MeToo movement hits Germany, the language has been catapulted to the center of a national debate about gender equality.

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Gender bias finds its way into "every nook and cranny of society," said Luise Pusch, a German linguist specializing in feminist speech.

The predominance of male nouns describing job openings means “girls often have a hard time imagining that they're also being sought out," Pusch said. "They're not only being shut out grammatically but also through their own image of this profession."

"Germans tend to see themselves as very progressive when talking about things like maternity leave," said Senta Goertler, an associate professor of German at Michigan State University. "But looking at the language and statistics about equal opportunities for men and women, they really aren't."

German women are still paid 21 percent less than men, slightly worse than the pay gap in the USA, according to government statistics, and many Germans oppose the idea of working mothers. Women's pensions average only about half those of men, according to a study in 2017 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s the greatest discrepancy of the 37 countries in the organization.

Fights by activists to make German more gender-neutral have mostly fallen flat.

Germany's Council for Orthography, which sets rules for spelling and grammar, shelved a debate about the issue. In March, a woman lost a lawsuit against the German bank Sparkasse for the right to be addressed using female-only nouns.

Even Merkel proved unhelpful to the movement by dismissing calls to change the national anthem to refer to the "homeland" instead of the "fatherland." Neighboring Austria, another German-speaking nation, omitted similar language from its anthem in 2012.

Such roadblocks are unsurprising in Germany, where people "don't seem to be very conscious of that connection" between the language and sexist behavior, said Michigan State's Goertler.

"I think that the gender balance in the German language is completely fine," said Swetlana Soschnilow, 33, an entrepreneur in Berlin. "It should be everyone's goals to have conversations about equality, but we need to make sure that things don't get carried away."

Sandra Pravica, 40, a university researcher and philosopher on maternity leave who struggled for years to break into a male-dominated field, said changes in the language would greatly expand women's job opportunities.

"These feminine forms (of nouns) suffer from the fact that they weren't ever used for years and years and weren't ever considered to be on par with the masculine form," she said. "It would make a lot of sense if schoolchildren could learn that there are two forms of nouns from a young age."

The fact that a debate over making German more gender-neutral is happening at all is something to celebrate, Pusch said. "They used to call all of us crazy," she said of those who advocated language changes decades ago. "But now the issue has arrived into the mainstream of society."



