Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: how do gender roles shape power structures — and how much has actually changed? Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Marc and Sabine dig into a topic that turns out to touch daily life more than expected: crash-test dummies modeled only on male bodies, the 12% of women in hospital leadership roles quietly steering where medical research funding goes, and a story Marc still remembers word for word — asking a female executive how she manages her kids alongside her career, and her reply: “funny, nobody ever asks my husband that.” The room also turns the lens on men, from custody battles that assume mothers by default to the three-quarters of German suicides committed by men under a masculinity ideal that leaves no room to struggle. Marc’s closing thought: real change starts less with what we demand from others, and more with the language we ourselves use around children every single day.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
The host opened today’s room on power and gender, wanting to look at how gender roles shape power structures. She was genuinely curious what first impulses would come up, so the room could work through different perspectives together and see where the conversation would go. As always, everyone was warmly invited to join each morning and bring pieces into the exchange. For anyone joining for the first time, a quick reminder that the room is recorded throughout, so joining counts as agreeing to it being published afterward. Three small room rules: a profile photo you can be recognized in, a first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio. Anyone who’d rather not is welcome to use the chat instead.
Sabine opened: tough subject again, she said. The first thing that came to mind was how we’re raised from early childhood — boys play with cars, boys play football, girls get dressed in pink and go to ballet. That’s certainly less pronounced today, but it still shapes children enormously and pushes them in a certain direction. She also thought of the traditional role of women — having children, feeding the family, and so on — something she thinks society has actively pushed back against, and which has genuinely shifted quite a bit today. That was her opening.
Wonderful, the host said — a great first approach to start with, and she suspected others would have plenty more examples too. She found Sabine’s closing point interesting — that things have shifted a lot today — because, interestingly, quite a few studies, once you look closely, show that the change we’d like to see hasn’t actually happened to the extent we assume. Because as soon as families have children, it’s often the case that classic role patterns reassert themselves. Which is exactly why there are various efforts underway — whether you consider them good or not is another question — like hiring quotas for women in certain positions, or things like parental leave benefits for men too, giving fathers time at home, at least for a limited period, even if not evenly used, aimed at using outside structures to keep pushing that change forward. She was curious what Sabine thought.
Sabine admitted that when quotas first came in, she found them awful — she always used to say, why do we need a quota at all, a woman, or anyone, should get the job because she’s good, not because a quota pushes her in. She thinks a bit differently now, unfortunately, because she’s seen repeatedly that without a quota, almost nothing changes. The quota is a bit artificial, admittedly, but it still helps nudge people toward thinking, and acting, differently. And yet, she said, we still see it in every analysis that comes out — even with quotas in place, women in the same positions still earn less.
Absolutely, the host agreed — those are, in a sense, well-known problems and challenges we still face as a society. And especially regarding power structures, it’s worth asking where else we can observe this. The first thing that came to her mind, especially given the quota discussion, was leadership positions specifically — women are increasingly present there too, but looking closely, the actual distribution is still fairly low, for a whole range of reasons: whether a leadership role can even be done part-time, whether the actual hours worked stay reasonable or balloon well beyond full-time, and whether, in some places, traditional role expectations still mean people don’t want to spend that much time at work in the first place. But as she said, the underlying reasons are genuinely varied, worth looking at more closely. And with that, Marc had joined — good morning, Marc, what did he think?
Good morning to the room, Marc said. He had two points to bring in. First — and here he was pointing at himself too — how we as parents shape these dynamics through our own language, often unconsciously. It starts with what boys wear, boys not showing emotion, men being the ones who start a family and support it, and so on — and through language, we exercise a kind of unconscious power over our children, shaping where their sense of self-worth forms and what they perceive as right or wrong. His second point, something he found genuinely fascinating and had only heard by chance on a science program: science itself operates on a male norm, in ways that stretch across so many fields you wouldn’t immediately think of. He wasn’t sure if this was still the case, but when he heard it, crash-test dummies used to study car accidents were only male-bodied — since women have a genuinely different body, the male body was treated as the default the entire safety system was built around. And it goes further, into medications and so on. He’d also seen just yesterday that in medicine, in university hospitals specifically, only 12% of leadership positions are held by women — back to the quota question — which naturally affects where research funding goes. Where does the money get spent, on which creams, which medications, which direction does research take? And with an 87 or 89% male share, of course men are the ones determining the direction medicine moves in. Those were his two contributions.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — genuinely fascinating. Sabine, thoughts?
The dummy example was fascinating, Sabine said — she completely believed it, and had genuinely never noticed, simply because that’s just how things are, how she grew up. She also mentioned talking with a client just yesterday who said his wife doesn’t work yet, she stays home, since her own mother always stayed home too, and she wants to give her children the same thing. Sabine said she’d bristled a little at that, thinking, okay, that’s such a typical pattern — she grew up the same way herself, her mother was home too, but for her personally, that ended up feeling discouraging, orienting her whole life around the children. And ultimately she doesn’t know if the children really benefit either, because then they have you as their role model, and it just continues on. She thinks children need room to develop themselves.
Thank you so much, the host said — and Sabine’s example sparked a thought pointing in another direction too. These power structures don’t only run in the direction of, say, disadvantaging women — men are also genuinely disadvantaged by gender roles and the power structures that follow from them. Looking at it from that angle, take divorce, for instance: there’s still a lingering assumption that the bond to the mother is somehow stronger, that a child stays with the mother by default while the father gets visitation rights or similar. Of course that gets examined case by case to some degree, but it often really does have to be “fought out” in court. And it’s not inherently true that children always have a stronger or closer bond to their mother — that’s how it’s often lived out socially, but it isn’t a given. Looking at it from that angle, this role understanding around gender creates its own power structure from the other side too. Anyone want to add to that?
Marc jumped back in: he found it fascinating, given the host’s own background in neuroscience, that we’re an aging population — and in the ’60s, the “breadwinner marriage” model was the norm. He hadn’t fully realized this either: men worked, and in the late ’60s and early ’70s there were demonstrations where women protested, saying that if a man’s work counted as work, then their own domestic care work should count as work too — they wanted to be paid for housework. And looping back to the aging population: if you look at judges handing down rulings under our current laws, they might be 40, 50, 60, maybe older still, given how few new judges are coming through. And it’s entirely predictable that if they grew up with the breadwinner marriage as their norm, that’s exactly the kind of ruling you’d get, because they simply never learned anything else — they grew up in a completely different environment. He doesn’t find that good, but he finds it genuinely fascinating to observe that we might need another whole generation before it becomes self-evident that men aren’t automatically expected to be the provider, that children can grow up just as well with their father, and — something the host had raised before — that men still have to justify themselves and get surprised looks when they say “my husband handles the household and I earn the money.” People might stay quiet out of politeness, but it’s still not considered normal, still raises eyebrows when a woman earns more than her partner, or when the man doesn’t work at all and takes care of the kids — that still causes genuine surprise today.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — and that really opens a door. It’s genuinely fascinating, because in exactly this context it becomes very clear that, in some ways, we’re not as far along as we sometimes assume. She could share this from her own experience: in her own household, there’s actually a role reversal of sorts — her husband is primarily responsible for raising the children, and still is today, while she’s effectively the primary earner. And it’s genuinely fascinating how people react to that. Many people ask what her husband does professionally, and when she says he’s a stay-at-home dad handling the kids’ upbringing, the next question is almost always, “and what else does he do?” They’d discussed this in other contexts before too — she doesn’t think that follow-up question ever gets asked about the woman in an equivalent setup. And it keeps putting him in a position of having to justify himself somewhat — you can see, from how people around you react, how this actually gets handled, which is exactly the unconscious bias at play, even though it has nothing to do with discrimination in the sense of holding some deliberately warped worldview — it’s simply that these structures, shaped by how we’re socialized, still quietly kick in without us noticing, and without any ill intent whatsoever. Marc or Sabine, anything to add?
Marc had to laugh: back when he was still in school, he once visited a neighbor and hadn’t realized, until much later, how much his own thinking had been shaped at home by that same role understanding. His mother had really taken care of everything — meals, homework, all of it. This neighbor then told him she ran a large management consultancy, and automatically, without even thinking, he did exactly what the host had just described and asked her, “how do you manage that with your kids?” She looked at him — he’ll never forget it — and answered, “funny, nobody ever asks my husband that.”
Lovely example, the host said. Sabine, anything more to add?
Sabine had a couple more points. This is definitely everywhere, she said — they have three children themselves, and people always ask how she manages it all. Well, you just juggle it together. But externally, people often have the wrong impression — everything is expected to run smoothly and standardized, and the household still tends to fall mostly on the woman, which is exactly why so many women end up overloaded, trying to handle their job and the household side by side. She thinks that’s still very much the case, while the man naturally handles the car, the garden, the technical stuff. That’s exactly the kind of understanding at play. She liked that the host had brought men into it too, since when we talk about role understanding, we mostly talk about the woman’s role, which is itself part of the problem. And she keeps seeing, in divorce cases specifically, plenty of women who think, great, I married well, and then genuinely try to squeeze their husband for everything they can, legally. It goes to court, and any original love plays absolutely no role anymore. One more point she had: it’s interesting that now, with our current shortage of workers and skilled labor, suddenly everyone’s saying we need to use women better, need more part-time options — essentially, what wasn’t accepted for years would actually help us today. And suddenly it’s even being mentioned in political discourse. She found that genuinely interesting.
Fascinating, the host agreed — on one hand it’s mentioned more. The question is whether it’s actually being implemented more too. If you just look at the job market, how many roles are actually advertised as part-time, or state that part-time is an option at all — comparatively, that’s still a vanishingly small share of the market. She thought Sabine wanted to add something else before Marc jumped in?
Sabine agreed completely: it gets presented publicly, she’s seen it repeatedly in political discourse, but not much has actually changed compared to twenty years ago. It’s still a fight to get a daycare spot or a childminder, and there’s still no real understanding if it’s only a part-time job at first with plans to increase hours later — the response is usually, well, it really should be at least 80%. So even the understanding of what “part-time” means isn’t necessarily half a position at all.
Marc jumped back in: today’s room had made him realize something about this aging society and unconscious bias — who actually hands out the marketing roles, who holds power today, where do the power structures actually sit? We really are, factually, an aging society, which means the people sitting in important positions, handing out new roles — whether in marketing or executive leadership — are people over 50, carrying that older way of thinking. And the host always puts it so nicely: that doesn’t make them worse, just older, working from a different set of experiences that keep leading them back to the same answers. And yet we expect these same people to suddenly imagine that a marketing role could be split between two people, or that a company could be run by two co-CEOs, one working half the week and the other the rest — and without real education around this, without genuine awareness-building — and here, thinking out loud, when we talk about “education” we usually mean children getting a good education so they can shape their future. But there’s a second dimension to education too: educated people we already have, the ones making decisions in leadership positions right now. They need to be “educated” too, in the sense of really reflecting on their own thought patterns, understanding that process, so they can actually arrive at new decisions at all. As long as that doesn’t happen, and the power structure stays exactly as it is, the decisions being made will keep looking exactly like the decisions of the past.
Thank you so much, the host said. Sabine wanted to continue.
Sabine had something to add: it’s also always the case that when a woman joins some committee or board and doesn’t simply fall in line, you can watch how long she actually stays. She’d seen this again recently — there was an IT professional who said she’d introduce IT properly, came across as confident and energetic, everyone thought it was great, and then, looking at her CV later, she’d not only left that company but had gone fully independent. Likely because she couldn’t get through with her approach in a board that was otherwise entirely male, which apparently just wasn’t wanted. Something else she noticed: we always say men promote men, because it simply feels more natural to them — and that puts women at a disadvantage too, in the sense that women don’t promote other women, or not enough of them.
Thank you so much, the host said — an interesting thesis worth looking at more closely, especially thinking about how what feels familiar tends to get chosen, particularly in interviews or similar settings. We do have professional fields that are heavily skewed toward one gender, and the people conducting interviews in those gender-dominated fields tend to be predominantly of that same gender. And if we assume that what feels “familiar” tends to get selected, that selection likely isn’t just about character traits, but about gender too — meaning a man might tend to prefer another man who also resembles him in other character traits, and vice versa for women. What did people think?
Marc had found a study the day before — he admitted he couldn’t say who conducted it, but it made sense to him: if 87% of leadership positions are held by men, it makes sense that men, being like-minded, tend to find sponsors and support structures more easily, simply because they’re surrounded by other men. And that study apparently found that men get criticized far less for mistakes at work than women do, precisely because the support systems and the real power structures within these companies and organizations are run by men. There was also a study from a Canadian university he found genuinely striking: in Germany, three-quarters of all suicides are committed by men. And part of the explanation given is the image of masculinity we still hold — a man is strong, doesn’t show emotion, has to handle everything himself. Nobody knows for certain, but that pressure seems to be a major factor in why so many men choose suicide — simply because they can’t bear that weight. It’s not as though being in leadership positions is automatically wonderful for men either — a lot happens under the surface that often goes unnoticed, even in men themselves.
And that ultimately shows, the host said, that all these labels we grow up with really do play a significant role — whether around gender or other topics. There are actually plenty of gender-independent aspects too, if you widen the lens: it’s not just gender shaping power structures, but socialization more broadly. Every kind of cultural background plays a role in shaping and perpetuating certain power structures. And change does happen, of course, but it’s usually tied to specific achievements, takes time, and historically, people have always had to actively push for their rights — regardless of whether we’re talking about women or men. On the men’s side, particularly around divorce and children, and Sabine had brought in that financial dimension too, the possibility of squeezing a partner financially. There’s clearly still a great deal happening here, with real, obvious need for action. Sabine, Marc, anything more, or further examples?
Sabine had another example, tied to the earlier point about male-dominated jobs, technical fields specifically. A friend of hers works in a technical role, manages a workshop, has almost entirely men reporting to her, and clearly does the job well. She’s active in a women’s network too, now working with a university to promote the field a bit. But when the position above her opened up and she applied, discussing it with her boss’s boss, his response was: do the current job for a few more years first, and we’ll see. Except she’s not exactly young anymore — when exactly is she supposed to move up? So the arguments people use can be a bit much sometimes. She was quite upset about it, and Sabine doesn’t think it’s an isolated case.
Marc, anything to add?
Marc said he’s part of this aging society himself, and noticed something in himself: he considers himself very open-minded, but personally, he has a problem with gendered language, and he does think about it, though he hasn’t landed on a settled answer for himself. He’d heard that there’s an engineering school in Aachen where the students are mostly men, and part of the reason so few women apply for these jobs, or even pursue that degree at all, is that job postings are worded as “engineer wanted” using the male form — which, from the outset, subtly excludes the idea that a woman could be a great engineer too. That argument does force him to think about whether gender-inclusive language actually makes sense in certain fields, precisely because it changes what images and thoughts form in people’s heads. But because his own thought patterns were shaped fairly firmly at a young age, he personally still struggles with gendered language, while accepting the argument that it could genuinely lead more girls, even in school, to ask themselves why they couldn’t become mathematicians, mechanics, or anything else still labeled a classic male profession or domain.
A genuinely fascinating topic, the host said, and it could well have some effect, though probably not enough on its own — because, as the broader discussion has long shown, it isn’t just the gendered wording in job postings, but the different adjectives used depending on the target audience. You notice the difference when you compare postings in female-dominated fields against postings in male-dominated ones — the language itself differs. Which means even switching to inclusive forms wouldn’t be enough on its own, because postings, as they’re typically written today, still speak less to women than to men regardless. What did Marc think?
That’s exactly why he loves this Deep Talk Club, Marc said — everything said so far had been more or less negative, and the real question is always what each individual can actually do, rather than finger-pointing. That word, “finger-pointing,” is genuinely his word of the year for 2023 — always some version of “what should someone do, what could others do.” He’s committing, at least through 2023 and beyond, to paying more attention to his own language, because he’s part of this aging society too, and because his own thought patterns and language might contribute, even if only in a tiny fraction, to changing something. Even just noticing how friends or acquaintances talk to their newborns — that’s where it starts. For him, at least, that’s definitely where it starts.
Thank you so much, the host said — and she wanted to bring in something from the chat too. Ela had shared some numbers: in 2022, the gender pay gap stood at 18% of men’s average gross hourly wage — meaning women’s average gross hourly wage was 18% lower than men’s, as of January 31, 2023, via Statista, with a link included. Thanks for that. And Jennifer had contributed the word “self-empowerment” — only those who are truly alive themselves can let others shine in their own greatness and power alongside them. The host loved that term, and mentioned that in a few days or weeks, they’d actually have a room specifically on self-empowerment, so they’d come back to it in more depth then. And Ole had added: in her view, it’s also fundamentally a money question, who stays home when children need care.
Someone picked that last point up warmly — and thought it would likely become even more true going forward. Looking at large parts of America, plenty of people already work two or three jobs just to get by, simply because they can’t afford otherwise. And in that light, staying home in Germany today is, in a sense, already a kind of luxury. Though whoever chooses that should get to make that choice themselves — that’s fine, but as Marc said, it shouldn’t turn into finger-pointing, which she found genuinely important.
The host picked the thread back up on parental leave specifically: some interesting things could be observed there too. Some men have genuinely embraced and used it, but there were also real workplace tensions, especially early on when it was first introduced — people genuinely startled, saying things like, “wait, you’re staying home?” And it’s worth looking at this from the perspective of men’s rights too — she thinks there are plenty of men who would genuinely love to spend more time with their children, but who, shaped by societal role expectations, end up giving that up in certain moments. That it’s a sacrifice too, not just a matter of wanting to. So while women often face career-advancement issues — how much can I earn, can I do this part-time and so on — men face their own version of these same questions too, ones that just don’t get nearly as much attention in the discussion, despite being at least as relevant in her view. What did people think?
Marc had a point about what we even define as “work” in the first place. He realized, talking it through, that even in this room, at least on his part, old thought patterns still show up — because that demonstration by women in the late ’60s he’d mentioned wasn’t actually about real wage demands. It was about the point that if we’re caring for our children and family, that is also work — and if it’s work, we want to be paid for it. And when we say we want to bring more women into the workforce and so on, there’s an unconscious assumption baked right back into that phrasing: that housework, that raising children, isn’t work at all. And that’s exactly where it gets complicated: is caring for and raising children equally valuable, is it work too? Then entirely new questions arise about how that should actually be compensated, what happens in a divorce, as already discussed, and so on. And you keep seeing this same complexity everywhere, because these topics are so interconnected that new doors keep opening up.
Absolutely, the host agreed — a genuinely lovely point. Sabine, go ahead.
Sabine connected it to something else entirely fitting: there’s currently a discussion about abolishing spousal income splitting for tax purposes. She doesn’t think it’ll actually happen, but it’s being discussed, and it would push in exactly the opposite direction, effectively saying: the woman who works part-time or not at all gets a proportional benefit through that tax splitting. She found that interesting. Something else worth mentioning: when a man takes parental leave, people often say, oh, are you hanging up your career? And another thing that struck her, with STEM subjects in school: when these subjects get added to the curriculum, it’s often framed as a choice between taking another language or going into STEM — and STEM classes end up heavily dominated by boys, languages heavily dominated by girls. Which is honestly a rough choice to put on children — maybe a girl wants to learn a language but also not miss out on STEM, and there’s the added issue of computer science specifically: her own daughter, now in 11th grade, was told she couldn’t take computer science because she hadn’t taken it in middle school.
Genuinely fascinating too, the host said — because ultimately, whether it’s STEM being promoted or something similar, if it’s only being shaped by society at this later stage, the real question becomes whether promoting STEM careers, say, isn’t already coming far too late. Because socialization happens on every level, not just at home, but through acquaintances, friends, daycare, school — it’s really a whole trajectory stretched across many years, and once that role understanding has already been shaped, we then try to correct what went wrong by, say, promoting STEM subjects afterward. That’s not to say it isn’t a sensible measure — the question is whether we should, and could, be starting much, much earlier. Marc, Sabine, thoughts?
Marc came back to the aging population again: teachers themselves are aging too — average age, he admitted he hadn’t looked this up precisely, somewhere around 40 to 50 at many schools. And it’s still the case, which is also a problem of limited pathways: we go to school, and if we’re lucky — or at least this is how he was raised — our children graduate with their Abitur, the academic-track diploma. And once they have that, they go to university. That’s still locked into people’s heads: getting your Abitur is the best thing you can do, that’s what proves your education matters. With an Abitur, you study. There’s barely any room left for the idea that someone could get an Abitur, even a university degree, and still go into a skilled trade, or a dual vocational training program — the idea of studying and then still going into a trade business afterward. No, studying still means something academic, because that’s still held in very high regard in Germany. And through today’s room, he kept coming back to realizing how much comes down to who actually holds the power to decide, or as he put it earlier, not finger-pointing — we can all contribute simply by becoming aware of how we ourselves think, how we tick, what conclusions we arrive at. But in schools, and in every key position really, sit people who are 40, 50, 60, 70, carrying the experiences they had, which were right for their time — and they’re the ones making decisions for a future none of us actually knows yet. And the only way through that is exactly what the host has always modeled: genuinely becoming aware of how we arrive at our conclusions, whether we can think differently, and why we think what we think. And that, in his view, isn’t education in the sense of new knowledge, knowledge to be applied — something the host had said before — but education in the sense of understanding how we ourselves tick, in order to reach new outcomes at all, and to be able to genuinely go searching again, to become pioneers again.
Thank you so much, the host said — and they’d actually have a room specifically on unconscious bias later too, because there are real limits here as well — meaning we won’t be able to fully dismantle this purely through education and awareness-raising. That’s exactly why she’d mentioned earlier, regardless of how anyone personally feels about quotas or similar measures, that in many places we genuinely need structural change too, to design processes in a way that supports people, precisely because of how we’re wired — since unconscious bias doesn’t just switch off through awareness alone, even when we genuinely believe ourselves free of prejudice. We think in categories; that’s simply built into us by nature. So up to a point we can influence it, and beyond that point, we don’t even notice we’re still subject to it. Which is exactly why we need certain processes and structures to support us in acting accordingly. And while they’d been talking, a chat comment had come in: “as an educator, I do essentially the same thing, except it’s not my own children — but I do get paid for it.” A genuinely interesting point to bring in. She also wanted to add another angle: technology. Not just human interaction, but things like AI and programming — who actually writes all the content online, who programs, who develops AI systems? Worth looking at too, since it surely has an effect. What did people think?
Marc mentioned he’d listened to a podcast with Dr. Ria Nollte on the drive back from the Netherlands, which he found genuinely interesting too. He kept coming back to language: it starts with children. When kids get labeled, say, with a reading and writing difficulty, they can relax, because now they have a diagnosis — I can’t do math, I can’t read, and that’s just the diagnosis, so there’s nothing more to do about it. He thinks our language is a genuinely essential part of how we develop. And the chat comment about educators and elementary school teachers — that starts far earlier than people think. It’s still the case today that schools struggle to find elementary school teachers. Why? Many people choosing teaching go into secondary or grammar-school teaching instead, because it’s simply better compensated — entirely understandable if you want to support a family, and maybe also easier, since working with small children demands intense care, whereas at the older level, unfortunately it’s still often just: here’s the textbook, and if you don’t understand what’s in it, you’re simply not cut out for school. That’s how it’s always been, and he’s heard from grammar-school teachers he knows personally, genuinely likeable people, who often respond with something like, “well, it worked for us, I went through school that way too.” And that raises the same discussion again: how do we value not just work in general, but the work of educators or elementary teachers specifically? Because elementary school is exactly where the foundational building blocks get laid. And yet it’s still the case that a grammar-school teacher is compensated more highly and starts higher on the pay scale, while an elementary teacher is still seen — and he said this deliberately provocatively — as someone who just watches over the kids, whose job is to prepare them for the next level of school. Society doesn’t honor that nearly as much, and it doesn’t carry the same prestige as being able to say you teach math or some other subject to the next generation.
And we can pick up this same aspect elsewhere too, the host added — not just around younger children’s pay, but looking in a completely different direction: what happens with care work, say? Who typically takes on caregiving, and how is that caregiving compensated or paid?
A huge topic in its own right too, she noted, one they’d already touched on in another room. There are a great many real problems there too, ones that often don’t get nearly enough focus in public discussion — only once you’re personally affected do you realize just how much genuine action is needed there, and how little is actually being done. There was also a chat comment from Sergen: “I think it’s more that this kind of pigeonholing gets actively trained into us.” Worth picking up too. Sabine, want to add to any of this?
Sabine, tying back to elementary schools and educators, and to gendered language: you just have to look at how few men are even in these professions — it’s basically an all-women affair. A friend’s son is studying elementary education now, and she wasn’t sure the parents were entirely thrilled — he enjoys it and can see himself doing it, but almost immediately people say, well, he wants to become a principal, not stay a regular elementary teacher. She also mentioned sitting with a teacher the day before, discussing AI in schools — the teacher didn’t see it as dramatic at all, said a lot is already happening in schools around integrating AI, that teachers have already received training on it. That surprised Sabine a bit, since she has no direct insight into it herself. But the teacher had also said it really depends on the individual — someone could attend the training and just decide to keep doing things the same way as before. Sabine has her doubts about how thoroughly it’s actually being implemented. The teacher also said, in the same breath, that she wasn’t sure whether a lot of real learning gets lost along that path — which loops back to the whole discussion around traditional academic education, grammar schools and so on. Sabine thought about it and figured the teacher probably has a point there too — though, she admitted, that’s drifting away from gender specifically.
Thank you so much, the host said — something worth adding here: Marc keeps rightly saying this isn’t about finger-pointing, but it’s still worth asking what contribution each of us can actually make. From that angle: certain groups often feel disadvantaged and, sooner or later, push for change themselves. And at the same time, since they’d just been discussing this, if statistically, once a family arrives, classic roles still get taken up more often than not — the woman leaning more toward caregiving, the man more likely heading to the playground or picking the kids up from daycare or school — and that’s statistically documented, not just her own claim — then women already play a specific role in shaping that imprint in a child too. And then, as discussed, educators are overwhelmingly women, and elementary teachers are overwhelmingly women too. Which means, on one hand, and she just wanted to point this out gently, we complain, in a sense, that equal pay isn’t happening, that there are real problems here — and at the same time, through our own patterns of socialization, we’re contributing to a dynamic that would actually need to be addressed much earlier than something like promoting STEM careers later on. There’s real need for action here too, and it’s worth us, as women specifically, becoming very aware that we ourselves shape this quite massively at a young age. And looking at it from neuroscience, the earliest years of life play an enormously significant role, because so much gets shaped and personality develops then — not first in the teenage years, but much, much earlier. Those early years matter enormously for personality development. That doesn’t mean it can’t be changed later, but it takes considerably more effort to work on changing it afterward than it would to shape that imprint correctly from the start — an imprint that isn’t innate, but one we ourselves impose from outside. And on the technology point she’d also wanted to briefly touch: looking at programming, AI and so on, it’s clear these are also male-dominated fields, which naturally has effects, both around gender specifically and in other directions too. There are some genuinely good pieces and documentaries worth watching on this — cases where discrimination shows up online, or in automated systems, precisely because the underlying programming was built a certain way, or because the systems were trained predominantly on, say, white faces and similar data. So things surface there too, sometimes only once someone is personally affected and starts digging into it, or begins researching it themselves. There’s a lot of genuinely interesting work in that direction, which naturally feeds back into power structures too. And these technological dimensions are especially fascinating to watch precisely because we so often have no visibility into it at all — we don’t know how something was programmed in the background, or what the system is actually reacting to.
Marc, go ahead.
Marc wanted to mention that podcast with Dr. Ria Nollte again — genuinely fantastic, he said, on courage and brain-friendly learning. Driving home, it occurred to him: in the past, if you got an assignment, say a presentation on dinosaurs, you’d go to the library, pull five or six books, spend the whole afternoon there, and the next day people would say, wow, Marc’s really diligent, really interested in the topic. If he uses today’s technology instead — and here he was back on the aging-society point, since he’d experienced this himself — teachers react as soon as kids use AI, say ChatGPT, for homework, immediately calling it cheating, saying you’ve deceived them, that it’s unfair. But maybe the assignment itself was poorly defined. The assignment never actually said “work this out from books, don’t use technical tools.” And to him, a computer is nothing more than a new, modern technical tool, exactly what books once were. If a teacher reacted in a more future-oriented way, they’d instead say: for this task, for this thought process — you had a problem, you looked for a solution, you used the computer, that’s great, I hadn’t thought of that myself, fantastic — motivating that shift in thinking about how we even evaluate this kind of work. But there again is that aging-society dynamic, himself included: oh, he’s cheating me, he didn’t write this himself, he had it written for him. Well, when he spent five hours in the library, he didn’t generate that information himself either — he copied it out, but the actual information about dinosaurs he found there was also produced by someone else. So there too, exactly as the host had put it so well, a shift in thinking needs to happen. And AI, something that came up beautifully in that podcast too, only delivers answers as good as the quality of the questions you ask — to finish the example, if I ask good questions, I get good answers, and that becomes the genuinely new, creative part of what a student actually contributes: not whether they use AI, but whether they ask intelligent questions.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — he’d given the podcast a lot of great advertising there, so she wanted to mention it properly for anyone who’d missed it. She’d had the chance to speak with Dr. Ria Nollte as a guest on her podcast, called “Mutmachgeschichten” (Courage-Building Stories), with “Rino” as a shorthand from her name — well worth a listen. She thought the conversation turned out beautifully, covering a wide range of topics, several of which they got to go into real depth on. Genuinely lovely impulses in there, she thought, and listening back to it afterward, she really enjoyed how that exchange unfolded. At the very end of the episode, she’d even mentioned getting goosebumps, and she felt the same listening back, because Ria brought in a genuinely wonderful closing quote — she wouldn’t give it away, worth listening to it yourself if you’re curious. With that, she wanted to move into today’s closing round. She thought some genuinely great points had come up today, and was curious what everyone’s highlights were, or what they wanted to underline. Sabine, then Marc, in that order.
When she first read today’s topic, Sabine said, she genuinely thought, I don’t know, I’m not sure which direction this will even go — and that surprised her. It turned out to be a topic that touches us daily, every minute of every day, even without finger-pointing, as Marc put it — just consciously paying attention to everyday life, and you keep running into it everywhere. Most of us, or many of us, genuinely want things to change and mean well, but because of how we were raised, we often behave the same old way and don’t actually change it. A wonderful topic, thank you, and she wished everyone a good day. Bye.
Thank you so much, and to you too, Marc.
It was lovely being here, Marc said. He found himself sitting with the word “power” in a completely different context, actually, since they’re an aging society and he has aging family members himself — one of whom hasn’t signed a healthcare power of attorney. It’s a strange feeling having to confront the possibility that strangers might end up taking over that power, right up to questions of guardianship and asset control. And you really feel what it’s like when power gets exercised by a third party — not necessarily connected to gender, but very much connected to power, when someone else exercises it and you’re genuinely powerless, either because you didn’t read up properly beforehand, or didn’t have the luck of meeting the right people, or because some people are simply resistant and unwilling to change. A genuinely wonderful topic today — sorry for drifting off-topic there at the end, it wasn’t directly about gender, but it connected to power very strongly for him. He wished everyone a wonderful day, and said it was lovely being back with the room again.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — and, funnily enough, she just noticed that the German term for “power of attorney” literally contains the word “power” in it too, so it makes sense it would connect back to power after all. And that’s how these rooms unfold, working through different focal points together. She was glad they’d brought in so many different examples today, showing just how much a part of everyday life these topics really are for all of us — not something that only happens somewhere out there, with other people, but something we’re genuinely woven into ourselves in many places, and where we can each make our own contribution, the same way we can also step back and observe, identifying where exactly these dynamics actually show up. Not a matter of leaving it to others to fix, but something we can actively help shape ourselves. Tomorrow the room continues with violence in pop culture — what does our fascination with violent media content say about us? She was genuinely curious about that one too, and invited everyone warmly to join again tomorrow morning at 8am, to open up different perspectives together and see what the room arrives at. With that, she wished everyone well and said see you tomorrow. Ciao!
Ciao!
