The Gender Star in German Confuses Learners. A New Study Says It Barely Does

If you have scanned a German job listing in the past year, you have probably seen something like "Wir suchen Mitarbeiter*innen für unser Team in München" and paused on that little asterisk sitting inside the word. It is not a typo, and it is not random decoration either. It is called the Gendersternchen, the gender star, and for a lot of learners it becomes one more thing to worry about right when they are already juggling cases, verb endings, and a visa deadline. New research published this year suggests most of that worry is misplaced.

Where the asterisk actually comes from

Most German nouns for people come in two forms, a masculine one and a feminine one built by adding "in" or "innen" onto the masculine stem. Der Student, die Studentin. For a long time, German used the masculine form generically, so "der Student" was technically supposed to include everyone, regardless of gender. Researchers have shown for decades that this convention quietly pushes women and nonbinary people out of the mental picture when people actually read or hear it.

Two fixes emerged. One neutralizes the noun entirely, so "Studenten" becomes "Studierende," those who study, a word that already sounds gender neutral and needs no punctuation at all. The other spells genders out directly. The gender star is the most visible version of that second approach. Take the masculine stem, add an asterisk, then add the feminine ending, so "Student" becomes "Studentin" in the singular or "Studentinnen" in the plural. The star signals that everyone between and beyond the binary is meant to be included, not just the two forms written out.

Where you will actually run into it

You will not meet the gender star in a textbook dialogue about ordering coffee. You will meet it in the parts of German life that matter most once you are actually trying to live there:

• Job postings, especially anything written by a company with an active diversity policy: Bewerberinnen gesucht, Mitarbeiterinnen
• University admission portals and emails from the Studierendensekretariat
• Official communication from some city administrations and larger employers
• Occasionally on forms and internal company documents

It is not consistent across the country. Bavaria, Saxony, Saxony Anhalt, and Hesse have restricted or banned the gender star in schools and official state administration, while plenty of universities and companies elsewhere use it as a matter of course. You will see both forms depending on which state, which employer, and sometimes which specific email you happen to be reading.

What the new research actually found

A study published in Frontiers in Language Sciences this year, run by researchers at Ghent University and the University of Freiburg, tested something nobody had actually measured before: does the gender star make German genuinely harder to read for people learning it as a foreign language, not just for native speakers.

Eighty university students studying German in Belgium read a set of short newspaper articles, half using the gender star (Kinobesucher*innen) and half using standard masculine forms (Kinobesucher). Researchers then measured how accurately students answered comprehension questions, how difficult they rated the sentences, and how long they took to read each text.

Average accuracy on comprehension questions came out to 78 percent, and the gender star made no statistically meaningful difference to that number. It did not meaningfully change how difficult students rated the sentences either, or how comprehensible they found the text as a whole. When researchers went back and read through the comments students wrote to explain their own ratings, only two out of eighty mentioned the asterisk as a factor at all. The thing that actually predicted whether someone understood a text was their overall German proficiency, exactly what you would expect, and it had nothing to do with which gender form the text used.

That lines up with a separate 2024 corpus analysis, which found that rewriting German text to be gender inclusive changes under one percent of all the words in it. The asterisk is a small edit sitting inside a noun you likely already recognize.

What this means for your exam and your study plan

For Goethe or telc B1 and B2 exams, you will not be asked to produce gender star forms yourself, and standard masculine forms are not penalized in speaking or writing sections. That part of your prep does not need to change.

Recognition is the part worth a few minutes of your attention, because the moment you start applying for jobs, you will run straight into it in exactly the kind of listings that actually decide whether your German is good enough for the role. A few things make it easy to parse on sight:

• Mentally strip the star and read the base noun. Mitarbeiter*innen means employees, all of them, not a special category.
• Do not confuse it with Studierende or similar neutral forms. Those already read as gender neutral on their own and never carry a star.
• Plural forms usually add one ending after the star. Singular forms sometimes double the article, like der/die Spieler*in, which looks clunkier and shows up far less often, so do not panic if you see it once.

This is exactly the kind of real reading practice Germanly pushes learners toward early, actual job postings and university text instead of only textbook dialogue, because the gender star and a dozen other everyday quirks show up in your inbox long before they show up on any exam paper.

Cases, verb endings, and word order are worth the anxiety they get from learners, because examiners actually test them and getting them wrong changes what you are saying. An asterisk sitting inside a plural noun is not that kind of problem. Recognize what it means, keep reading, and spend the rest of your energy where it actually moves the needle.