Is a consultant available?

At least for the older generation in the SAP community, it is a natural requirement to have a consultant advising one's company - regardless of whether that person is male, female, or diverse, right? SAP software is complex, and if "consultants" now also means only "male persons," then things can get complicated.

The E-3 editorial team is not against gendering words and breaking up and questioning traditions. Quite the opposite: We put everything up for discussion, because ERP life is change, whether technical, organizational or business release change. We do not want to and will not exclude anyone from our community of values - whether female, male or diverse!

All we ask is that you understand when reading our complex texts that we naturally want to do without extended challenges. Of course, we always mean the entire SAP community in all its wonderful manifestations.

On Spiegel Online, under the headline "Criticism of Gender Language: Adventurous Duden Creations" by grammar expert Gisela Zifonun from the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim: "If I call an author one of the most important writers, it is a much smaller praise than to say: she is one of the most important writers - because in the second case the author is compared with all writers."

The E-3 editorial team also always wants to refer to the entire SAP community, so it is very much worth questioning what is actually happening here. Linguist Ursula Bredel explains it in the quoted Spiegel Online article: "The determination of the grammatical genus masculine to the natural gender does not correspond to the systematics of German." Or, in other words, in the words of the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: It is true, everything could be justified somehow. But the phenomenon of language is based on regularity, on agreement in action.

If the consultant were really and exclusively male and not "only" a grammatical genus masculine, then a job advertisement with the designation "consultant (m/f/d)" would be fundamentally wrong, because can there be a male consultant who is female or diverse at the same time? Again Wittgenstein from his Tractatus logico-philosophicus: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

There are also other points of view: In the online dictionary, you can find the new neologisms "guest" and "villain." Whether these neologisms help in the search for a good hostess can be questioned.

In the E-3 editorial team, we greatly value the knowledge of SAP consultants and are happy to have every expert, every author. We will thus continue to apply a cross-gender use of the masculine form in our texts - and ask that this be taken into account. Thank you.