Gender-inclusive language in the corporate communication of German companies : authentic corporate activism or pinkwashing?

Commitment to gender equality and diversity has long been a stated priority for large companies, and one visible way to signal this commitment is through gender-inclusive language. Public debates around such language use increasingly surface regarding companies’ communication with stakeholders, including employees, customers, and shareholders. In particular, the adoption of newer forms of gender-inclusive language that move beyond the traditional binary framework is often interpreted as a form of political positioning. Critics contend that these practices are unnecessary or serve merely to polish a company’s image, lacking genuine engagement with gender equality. If accurate, this critique implies that the practice reflects not authentic corporate activism but rather a form of CSR-washing – specifically, pinkwashing. We examine whether major publicly listed German DAX companies engage in pinkwashing by employing explicit gender-inclusive markers (e.g., the asterisk in Kund*innen ‘customers’) in their corporate communication without accompanying commitment to other gender-equality measures. To address this question, we employ a mixed-method approach that combines manual linguistic annotations of personal nouns with quantifiable economic data on the representation of women on executive and supervisory boards. Our findings show that companies that perform poorly on increasing women’s representation on their executive and supervisory boards do not use gender symbols on their company websites in 2023. Furthermore, they do not introduce gender symbols in their annual shareholder letters from 2015 to 2022 before achieving improvements in women’s representation on their executive boards. These results suggest that German companies do not use gender-inclusive language as a form of pinkwashing, but rather as a symbolic complement to broader gender-equality initiatives. Whether such patterns will persist amid growing political resistance to DEI efforts, particularly in international contexts, remains to be seen.