Kultur 5

The article about women in Germany was very interesting because I couldn't help but compare it to the little I know about French culture. I'm not by any means an expert but it seems to me that when it comes to women in the workplace the French are a little more sexist. I think this is the same in German but in France there are different names for male and female professions. For example, a male postal worker is facteur but a female postal worker is factrice. Also, the French sometimes are very typical and refuse to make any distinction at all in the word spelling and simply add "femme (woman)" to the end of the profession to make the distinction. (Example: un ingénieur (male engineer), une femme ingénieur (female engineer)) This however differs in French speaking parts of Canada where they have adopted different spellings for female occupations. Obviously we don't have a distinction like that for most professions in English. I know there isn't perfect gender equality here, but I like to think that it's pretty close. I've read articles that suggest thinking differs from language to language. Like that article we read earlier said a German speaker may think of bridges as beautiful and elegant because bridge is a feminine noun but to a French speaker bridges might be powerful and sturdy because bridge is a masculine noun to them. I'm not calling these languages sexist of course, but it does make me think that gender inequality may stem from these simple nouns.
Anyways, I think this is a great achievement for German women. It really amazed me to learn how progressive women are as far as getting an education and entrepreneurship. It's comforting to hear that there isn't much of difference in earnings between men and women. There is a difference, but it's rather slim, 99% wasn't it? It reminded me of an interview I heard of a woman, Lilly Ledbetter, who held a position at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company  in Alabama. She shared the highest position in the company with two other men but was paid significantly less just because she was a woman. She calculated that she had lost out on an enormous sum of money because of pay discrimination. Eventually the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into affect because of her story.