Language has a major influence on our thinking. It structures our understanding of the world. Conversely, what language does not name is not perceived by people. This leads to social exclusion and discrimination.
Language conveys gender stereotypes. It plays an important and complex role in the production of gender and certain ideas of gender. A simple example is first names, which are generally interpreted as female or male.
The Observatory aims to use gender-sensitive language on its website and in its publications. Gender-sensitive language seeks to develop and establish linguistic forms that represent and address all people and thus reflects gender diversity.
We want to consciously move away from a binary language that only includes cis-hetero people in the form of women and men. In this way, we also take up evidence-based research findings that gender exists on a spectrum (Ainsworth 2015).
However, data that reveal gender-related differences continue to be collected in binary form in most cases (e.g. the gender pay gap). This also serves to make the structurally determined gender-related disadvantage of women compared to men visible.
The Observatory wants to make fundamentally structural, gender-related exclusions and discrimination visible. At the same time, we would like to draw attention to the fact that the binary understanding of gender on which language is based is inadequate. For these reasons, we use the gender star for women* and men*. In this way, the structural inequalities to the detriment of women* remain visible and are explicitly named, while the gender star simultaneously breaks up the binary language.
If spellings deviating from the gender star (*) appear in our texts, we have adopted these as self-designations from the original text or it is clear that only women and/or only men are meant, for example in legal texts or if the persons named have explicitly assigned themselves to one of the two genders