Gender and maths

One fascinating feature of the contemporary German language is its attention to gender. I don’t mean just that words necessary must “agree” with gender in the grammatical sense, but also that the abstract person tends to be carefully addressed as “She or he” and also the endings of words are carefully tailored to reflect both genders, and more recently, also multiple genders (I’ve been told that you could write Physiker/innen or Physiker_innen, where the / or _ signifies “all others”). Here is the example that prompted this post: the title of a course in mathematics for physicists at the TU-Berlin

Mathematik für Physikerinnen und Physiker IV

It would be interesting to read something about the history of how German became gender aware. For now all I know is based on observations [and my own improving, but still very far from good, knowledge of German].

Tagged , , ,

Leave a comment