Finally looked up what that '(all genders)' thing on job ads means

I interviewed at a German automation supplier a couple years back and every single posting on thier careers page had the m/f/d tag, even for the internship listings. I asked the hiring manager about it during my second call beacuse I genuinely thought it might be some kind of quota system. She laughed and said it's just the law - Germany requires job ads to be gender-neutral in wording, and since there's a third legal gender option, they list all of them to cover themselves. If a posting only said 'male', a female applicant could actually sue them for discrimination. So it's compliance wearing a friendliness costume, basically. What surprised me more was that she said nobody in the German office even notices the tag anymore. It's like seeing 'EOE' on US postings, your eyes just slide past it. The '(all genders)' phrasing is newer and mostly aimed at English-language listings where the legal pressure doesn't exist but companies copy the convention anyway.

I'm a woman and I've applied to plenty of those tagged roles without ever thinking about the checkbox. The part that actually filters people is the usual stuff: do you know your way around gate drivers, can you read a datasheet without drowning. The tag has never mattered once I got past the first screen.

I work for a company with a US parent and a Munich office, and when we started posting jobs there our HR person had to rewrite every title because the German form of the job name itself is gendered, like the word for engineer ends in something masculine by default. She explained that if you only write the masculine form, women can legally skip applying and later claim discrimination, so the tag at the end is basically the company covering itself. The '(all genders)' wording showed up after the court decision recognizing a third option, and our legal team in Hamburg said it was the safer phrasing going forward.

What surprised me was how normal it is over there. Nobody in the Munich office even sees the tag anymore, it's like a period at the end of a sentence. When our US recruiters saw it for the first time they assumed it was some diversity scoring thing and tried to remove it, and the German team pushed back hard because leaving it off is the actual risk.

So from my side of it, the label says less about the company's values and more about which country's lawyer wrote the posting. I'd apply and not think twice about it.

Funny timing, I just went through this applying for a power supply design job in Hamburg. My German is basically restaurant-level so I nearly closed the tab when I saw the tag, figured it was some internal code. A recruiter buddy told me just ignore it and honestly the only thing that got me through the technical screen was knowing my way around an oscilloscope probe compensation demo, they love that stuff. Got the offer, nobody asked about the tag once. It really is just wallpaper over there.