Gender Sensitive Communication within CASA

Equal opportunities are an essential part of the Cluster of Excellence "CASA - Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries". Outstanding science can only arise if we have an open culture and a way of thinking that goes beyond the boundaries of gender assignments. This is not only expressed in funding measures and collegial cooperation, but also in the way we communicate.

Within our Cluster of Excellence we have thus agreed on various linguistic techniques to enable gender-sensitive communication.

The Genderstar within CASA

To express the diversity of the sexes in language use, we use the so-called "gender star". This asterisk is located between the (german) feminine and masculine gender of the word. It is a symbolic placeholder for diverse and open gender.

Sometimes, however, we use explicit gender attributes, for example when it comes to the concrete fundings of women. We always imply in these cases everyone who consider themselves belonging to that gender, regardless of their biological sex. In some places, we mark this with a standard formulation among our contributions.

“In case of using gender-assigning attributes we include all those who consider themselves in this gender regardless of their own biological sex.”

In other places we use a "consecutive gender star" ( eg in female* researchers), where the asterisk refers to all those considering themselves belonging to that gender.