Gender-Fair Language in Organizations: Attracting Potential Leaders and Promoting the Organizational Image of Gender Equality

In many languages, masculine generics are the traditional way of referring to women and men. However, gender-fair forms (e.g., feminine-masculine word pairs) can enhance gender equality: for instance, they counteract male biases in mental associations (Stahlberg et al., 2007) and evoke more neutral perceptions of gender-stereotypical professions (Merkel et al., 2013). Compared to masculine forms, use of gender-fair language in advertisements for leadership positions also helps to achieve gender equality in hiring decisions (e.g., use of German Geschäftsführerin/Geschäftsführer 'CEO fem/masc' instead of Geschäftsführer 'CEO masc', cf. Horvath & Sczesny, 2012). The present research investigates how potential applicants react to the use of gender-fair vs. masculine forms in German job ads for leadership positions (Study 1) and how the respective organization is perceived in response to these forms (Study 2). In Study 1, 251 participants showed higher intentions to apply for a leadership position when it was advertised with a feminine-masculine word pair instead of a masculine form; this was mediated by job appeal and organizational attraction. In Study 2, 154 participants perceived the organization as more discriminatory when masculine forms were used. This was mediated by the organizational image of gender equality. Thus, gender-fair language affects the social perception of a job and the respective organization and can impact social behavior in an organizational context.

Step by step: correcting our mental image of the mušlālu

The mušlālu, which is usually understood to be a step- or ramped gate, has so far rarely been discussed in much detail, even though the texts mentioning it have been known for a long time. This is no doubt because the evidence on which to base both philological and archaeological investigations appears sparse and scattered. Up to now, scholars have tended to focus on specific mušlālu-structures. Consequently, there are as many discussions as there are mušlālu-structures. This article attempts to get a sense of the broader picture by bringing together the philological and archaeological data hitherto available with the aim of discussing the mušlālu as term and structure, clarifying the semantics and reassessing the architectural identifications. We hope to demonstrate that it is actually possible to take the evidence one step further and correct the mušlālu image that prevails.

Holomorphic families of nonequivalent embeddings and of holomorphic group actions on affine space

We construct holomorphic families of proper holomorphic embeddings of \mathbb {C}^{k} into \mathbb {C}^{n} (0\textless k\textless n-1), so that for any two different parameters in the family, no holomorphic automorphism of \mathbb {C}^{n} can map the image of the corresponding two embeddings onto each other. As an application to the study of the group of holomorphic automorphisms of \mathbb {C}^{n}, we derive the existence of families of holomorphic \mathbb {C}^{*}-actions on \mathbb {C}^{n} (n\ge5) so that different actions in the family are not conjugate. This result is surprising in view of the long-standing holomorphic linearization problem, which, in particular, asked whether there would be more than one conjugacy class of \mathbb {C}^{*}-actions on \mathbb {C}^{n} (with prescribed linear part at a fixed point).