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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

> We are not required to do this by business, however there is now state legislature that requires that any job posting must include explicit naming of genders male/female/diverse. That is männlich/weiblich/divers in German (m/w/d abbreviated, you will find it on every job posting or you face serious fines).

I don't get, why would job postings (as in, the ad for the job, not the candidate's application for the job) require gender? Are the job postings like "we want a programmer and we expect him to be male"?

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The short answer: German is not English.

The German language allows for both male and female forms of most job descriptions(like with actor and actress). It doesn't help that we have a male, female and neutral form of "the" which are seemingly randomly used for certain words, and often also differently when used in a plural form.

This mixed with gender debates has lead to a lot of controversy and many more or less wild suggestions for "fixing" the language.

The explicit mention of male/female has been mandatory for quite a while, and now that "diverse" was added as a third officially recognised gender this is now required as well. The whole reasoning behind this is that hiring decisions must not be based on gender, so companies also have to clearly indicate that - whether that actually reflects reality is another can of worms.

I think a big part of the problem is that there is so much gendered language in german. So there are no progammers, there are male programmers (Programmierer) and female programmers (Programmiererin), which leads to both forms or short forms being used (Programmierer/in) in these postings to be inclusive. But I don't even know if there is an accepted neutral form of the word if you wanted to address someone non-binary.

So, while the whole (m/w/d) thing is kind of silly, it on the other hand makes it clear, that whatever gendered form you use, you don't actually care about gender.

I really hope we can someday find acceptable neutral forms for these words. It would make many things much easier in german.

From my high school German decades ago, I remember that all nouns have a built-in gender, which changes articles and adjectives around the words. Has the recent inclusion trend affected the language? Do you have to say der/die Lampe, ein/eine Stuhl in order to be inclusive? Or do you just use das for everything? Or has it not affected how you say inanimate objects?

It hasn't really affected the language outside of some fringe groups and doing what you suggest is the kind of behavior that gets regularly made fun of when someone tries it.

For most germans, this seems silly, since we don't know or care why specific objects have a specific gender. Why are spoons male, forks female and knives neuter? Who knows? But then again, using the wrong pronoun still often sounds really weird to us, so no just using "das" for everything.

But of course, there are words where it can matter, especially since der/die/das are also used to refer to peoples positions for example. So I always thought having a neutral word accepted by others like 'the' in english could help german to get easier for everyone to learn while also making many things more gender neutral.

Incidentally, the language is changing here, but not because of gender issues, but rather because we incorporated many foreign words, often english, in the last decades and also many new immigrants have come to germany with not as good a grasp on the language. So, if you ask People for example which pronoun to use for "Blog", you will get three different answers. And while people poke fun at it, it is also not unusual to hear someone say something like "der Frau". People then just assume you are not very fluent in german but that's about it.

No, the reason is that people of all genders should feel addressed. There is a female version of programmer (and any other occupation) in German, but you can use the male form to address female programmers too. Some argued that some would not feel addressed correctly.

I have never seen a posting where gender was a requirement. You often saw something like this (rough translation):

"With equal qualifications, female candidates get preferential treatment."

Haven't seen that in a long time and I don't think it was mandatory, but some employers used such a clause.

Don't think I ever saw a gender specific job posting aside from movie roles, dancers, etc.

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