3 ms·

I believe the quotas were agreed with partner parties during the coalition negotiations. Maybe they're even set in stone in the coalition contract.

danbruc 4y ago
Which is a stupid idea to begin with. If you have equally qualified people, fine, pick by gender, but don't make gender the primary criterion. But they thought this through as well as the train wreck that gender neutral language is.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Doesn't German already have a grammatical neuter?
  - ido 4y ago
    Yeah, but you can't just refer to people as "Das", it would be like referring to them as "it" in English (i.e. it sounds like you're talking about an object rather than a person).
  - danbruc 4y ago
    German has Genus and Sexus, grammatical and natural sex. Das Mädchen means girl, grammatically it is neuter but naturally of course feminine. The main issue is that many job titles are grammatically masculine - der Lehrer, teacher - and there is a derived variant for women - die Lehrerin, female teacher - but none for man, in which case the generic term - der Lehrer - is reused. So they came up with the idea to always writer der/die Lehrer*in because der Lehrer could be understood as generic but also as masculine. Or some variant of this, they can not even agree on how exactly it should be written or spoken. The much more sane way to do it would be to just drop the female variant and retrain people over time to no longer infer a natural sex from the grammatical sex. We even already do this in cases where there are no natural sex specific variants, der Mensch means human, grammatically masculine but no one derives from that that we are talking about a man. Die Leiche means corpse, grammatically feminin but no one derives from that that we are talking about a woman. And if you really have to differentiate, then you can always use adjectives, der weibliche Lehrer, der männliche Lehrer, the female teacher, the male teacher.
- kbelder 4y ago
  Well, yes, but you shouldn't be making gender the secondary or tertiary criterion either.

danbruc 4y ago

Which is a stupid idea to begin with. If you have equally qualified people, fine, pick by gender, but don't make gender the primary criterion. But they thought this through as well as the train wreck that gender neutral language is.

pjc50 4y ago
Doesn't German already have a grammatical neuter?
- ido 4y ago
  Yeah, but you can't just refer to people as "Das", it would be like referring to them as "it" in English (i.e. it sounds like you're talking about an object rather than a person).
- danbruc 4y ago
  German has Genus and Sexus, grammatical and natural sex. Das Mädchen means girl, grammatically it is neuter but naturally of course feminine. The main issue is that many job titles are grammatically masculine - der Lehrer, teacher - and there is a derived variant for women - die Lehrerin, female teacher - but none for man, in which case the generic term - der Lehrer - is reused. So they came up with the idea to always writer der/die Lehrer*in because der Lehrer could be understood as generic but also as masculine. Or some variant of this, they can not even agree on how exactly it should be written or spoken. The much more sane way to do it would be to just drop the female variant and retrain people over time to no longer infer a natural sex from the grammatical sex. We even already do this in cases where there are no natural sex specific variants, der Mensch means human, grammatically masculine but no one derives from that that we are talking about a man. Die Leiche means corpse, grammatically feminin but no one derives from that that we are talking about a woman. And if you really have to differentiate, then you can always use adjectives, der weibliche Lehrer, der männliche Lehrer, the female teacher, the male teacher.
kbelder 4y ago
Well, yes, but you shouldn't be making gender the secondary or tertiary criterion either.