LGBTQIA+, FLINTA*, Gender Pay Gap and Co. – you should definitely know these terms and abbreviations
Able bodied
“Able-bodied” is the opposite of “disabled” and accordingly means non-disabled people who do not experience discrimination based on their physical abilities. In contrast, disabled people often suffer from ableism.
ableism
“Ableism” is hostility toward people with disabilities. The term is composed of the word “able” (English for “to be able”) and the suffix “–ism”, which stands for a state of mind or belief according to which the evaluations of fellow human beings take place. That is, “ableism” describes the devaluation of people who are actually or supposedly limited in their abilities – people with physical or mental disabilities. Ableism is widespread in our living environment, whether in everyday language (when people are derogatorily called “stupid” or “crazy”) or also in anti-disabled urban planning, in which, for example, not all subway stations have elevators, etc.
care work
Care work refers to tasks and activities away from the workplace that are carried out unpaid, although they make a contribution to the common good of society. This means all work where you take care of something – hence the common German term “care work”. This includes looking after and caring for children and relatives, household chores, but also, for example, voluntary work or supporting friends. However, care work is not only unpaid, it is also not distributed fairly in many countries – Germany is one of them. Because it is still predominantly women who do the essential part of the daily care work in family and friends relationships. This imbalance in turn leads to the gender care gap. Migrant women are also particularly affected by the negative effects of care work, because they usually not only do their own care work, but are often underpaid care workers in bad employment conditions, such as in nursing or childcare.
Cis
You’ve heard “Cis” quite a few times now, but you don’t know exactly what it means? “Cis” is short for “Cisgender” and refers to people who identify with the gender assigned to them at birth. Cis is also used as an adjective: cis woman, cis man. Accordingly, cis is the equivalent of “trans” and “non-binary” – i.e. people who do not identify themselves with their gender entry recorded in the birth register or who do not see themselves represented in the binary male/female gender system.
female gauze
The “Female Gaze” is an expression that is used particularly often to explain certain, mostly anti-sexist, forms of representation in films or books. Stories told from the “Female Gaze” try to break up the heteronormative narratives in which women appear in a particularly stereotypical way, and act in the same way that they are mostly reduced to their looks. In short: The “Female Gaze” tries to capture the still dominant “Paint gauze” that portrays women primarily as objects of heterosexual male desire and one-dimensional in character.
FLINTA*
FLINTA* stands for groups of people who are particularly discriminated against in a patriarchal society because of their gender identity. The abbreviation is made up of the terms women, lesbian, inter, non-binary, trans and agender people. As is often the case with abbreviations of groups of people (as “+” in the case of LGBTQIA+), the asterisk at the end serves to represent people who do not feel they belong to any of the groups represented by a letter – but are still not a cis male and thus belonging to a threatened group in a patriarchal society.
By the way: The “L” for “lesbian” is the only letter that does not explicitly refer to the gender identification of people, but to their sexuality. The letter was included in the abbreviation for several reasons. One reason is that it is important to recognize the particular role that lesbians and demonstrations they organize have played in history for feminist equality. Another reason is that the inclusion of lesbians in the FLINTA* term is intended to emphasize that in a heteronormative society, it is often assumed that the standard for cis women should be a relationship with cis men.
gender care gap
The term “gender care gap” is derived from “gender pay gap”, i.e. the gap between the salaries of men and women. The care gap, in turn, measures how different the care work is care work is called, is distributed between the sexes. The current equality report by the Federal Office for Family shows that the gender care gap in Germany is 52.4 percent.
This means that women do 52.4 percent more unpaid care work than men every day – they do more housework, are more involved in caring for children and relatives and other tasks that are performed unpaid every day. This corresponds to a daily expenditure of one hour and 27 minutes more.