Binnen-I

The situation in German, however, is more difficult since all nouns have one of three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Other gender-inclusive typographic conventions exist in German that perform a similar function, such as the gender star.

Part of the academic ferment in the United States in second-wave feminism in the 1970s was the attention paid to gender bias in language,[1] including "the uncovering of the gendered nature of many linguistic rules and norms" and how the use of language could be analyzed from a feminist viewpoint.

In referring to a mixed (male/female) group of people, historically one would use the generic masculine, for example, Kollegen (masc.

At the end of the 1970s, groundbreaking work created the field of German feminist linguistics[e] and critiqued both the inherent structure and usage of German on the one hand, and on the other, men's and women's language behavior, and concluded that German is antagonistic towards women (frauenfeindlich), for example, in the use of the generic masculine form when referring to mixed groups which makes women have no representation in the language, mirrors a "man's world," and makes it seem like students, professors, employees, bosses, politicians, every group spoken about—is male, and women were invisible in the patterns of speech; and went on to say that language doesn't only mirror reality, it creates it.

There are four methods, of varying levels of acceptance:[10] In 1990, this usage caused a kerfuffle in the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia, when an official complaint was lodged by the chair of the Free Democratic Party against the Green Party, who had used some words with medial capital I in some of their parliamentary motions, saying that it was "incorrect according to the German language".

The same year, the Wiesbaden Magistrate recommended the use of medial capital I for municipal office use, and prohibited the use of purely masculine terminology.

[citation needed] The gender star is another recent, nonstandard typographic convention influenced by feminist linguistics.

)[13] Luise Pusch criticized the gender star because it fails to get rid of the "linguistic invisibility of women".