Frangipani
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Hi DingoBorat,
although Mercedes Benz’s tribute to International Women’s Day on March 8th may have come across as a little awkward, I don’t think they meant to sound condescending at all.
As for “one of our female engineers”: in German, we can simply add the suffix -in to many professions in order to express that a person is a female, similar to the much rarer English suffix -ess as in seamstress, waitress, stewardess or Empress.
So the technically male form Ingenieur (engineer) becomes Ingenieurin, Informatiker (computer scientist) becomes Informatikerin, Pilot (you guessed it - pilot) becomes Pilotin, Arzt (medical doctor) becomes Ärztin (some cases like this one involve a vowel change as well), you name it…
(I will just mention the current heated debate about gender-neutral language in German as a side note - personally, I habitually list both genders when talking about a mixed group of male and female persons such as “Lehrerinnen und Lehrer” (teachers), whereas other people consider the male plural to be inclusive enough. Since the 1980s, new forms have emerged such as Lehrer/innen, Lehrer_innen or LehrerInnen to encompass both male and female forms in writing and even more recently also Lehrer*innen (which is pronounced with a so-called glottal stop, that sounds like the tiny gap in uh-oh) to refer to all genders, including people who identify as non-binary etc. This has led to very heated debates in recent years about the use of gender-neutral language when talking about people. Note that this does not concern the three grammatical genders of German nouns in general, though, so no relief here for beginning learners of German
).So when the Mercedes press department wants to refer to women in engineering in German-language publications, they will use exclusively feminine nouns such as Ingenieurin (singular) or Ingenieurinnen (plural), which do not have an equivalent in English, though. That’s why in this English-language post, the author felt the need to add the adjective “female”, which, however, seems to reinforce the stereotype that engineers are normally male and the female ones are the exotic and thus odd ones out. While the male-female ratio amongst automotive engineers admittedly happens to be pretty lopsided, the German nouns Ingenieur/Ingenieurin are more neutral in that respect (even though one could argue that even from a grammatical point of view, the male form is the norm, and the female form is marked as different).
Unfortunately that doesn’t equate to greater gender equality in German-speaking countries, though: women in male-dominated fields sadly still get belittled by some ignorant people, even though they have the exact same degree, and there is also the gender pay gap problem in general - so, much to be desired! In fact, some women even prefer to refer to themselves as “Ingenieur” rather than “Ingenieurin”, because they feel that this way others will respect them more, although to me personally it sounds very odd.
Anyway, back to the original post and the lady in the driver’s seat: the ADAS development engineer’s name is Katharina Kupferschmid (check out Markus Schäfer’s LinkedIn comment). She has been with Mercedes for almost 20 years, and I bet she was not just posing for that picture in Saudi Arabia, merely pretending to drive, but was absolutely and confidently test driving the EQXX Vision herself.
What makes me so sure about that? Well, Mercedes not only seems to have trusted her not to crash their precious concept car, but had even handpicked her to chauffeur German Chancellor Olaf Scholz around a 2.8 km test track in an EQE SUV, when he visited the Sindelfingen Mercedes plant on March 4. However, according to German news reports and Scholz’s social media accounts (where he also mentions discussing the importance of AI with Mercedes staff, by the way), the Chancellor actually asked to sit behind the steering wheel himself, telling his three passengers (including Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius, who sat in the back seat) he would really enjoy doing so, because he rarely gets to drive himself any more these days, as he is usually being chauffeured in his armoured official state car (which happens to be a Mercedes, too - a Mercedes S 680 Guard, to be precise). And you know what they say: When You Wish Upon A Mercedes Star, Your Dreams Come True…
(Photos of the Chancellor in the driver‘s seat of course led to a flurry of sarcastic comments by posters critical of his government coalition’s politics, but I suppose there would have been just as many taunting comments had he been caught in the passenger seat, being chauffeured by a female driver…
)See Katharina Kupferschmid’s activity on LinkedIn
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While I believe that Mercedes are genuinely proud of their female staff and I appreciate them shining the light on women that can inspire others around the world to take the steering wheel of life into their own hands, the photos taken in Saudi Arabia and the accompanying text seem to ignore the fact that women there still do not enjoy equal rights compared to men and have only been allowed to drive a car since 2018! (It’s hard to imagine this official Mercedes LinkedIn post could intentionally be taking a dig at the Saudi government, although I would love to read that between the lines).
IMO Mercedes did a better job in 2019, when they honoured International Women’s Day with a short film on Bertha Benz (1849-1944), the automotive pioneer, business partner and wife of Carl Benz. Not many people seem to be aware that she was instrumental in the foundation of Mercedes-Benz. The 4 min short film Bertha Benz - The Journey That Changed Everything, shot like a classic Western, tells the story of the world’s first long distance drive in a car from Mannheim to Pforzheim (106 km) in 1888. The only gripe I have about it is that they shot the film in English rather than German, which is totally unauthentic. Why?! They could have easily subtitled it for an international audience… Anyway, I thought it was worth watching.
You can also find a an excellent summary of that legendary trip on Wikipedia:
