Inclusive language and the decline in interest among younger women.

Here in Germany I am studying at the Seminar für Übersetzung und Dolmetschen (School for Translation and Interpreting) where I take some classes in interpreting and translation. The majority of these classes are held by the same Australian woman who is retiring next year. While this woman is an excellent teacher - truly outstanding - she has also clearly been heavily influenced by the modernist and feminist agendas of her age bracket (that of my parents and just a little older) for she is always banging on about using "they" instead of "he", which the Germans would do naturally. For her, she doesn't feel at all included in collective nouns such as mankind, brotherhood, or in German die Lehrer (which is strictly speaking the masculine plural of teacher - the exclusively feminine plural would be die Lehrerinnen, where the singular is die Lehrerin - feminine persons are usually ascribed the suffix -in, with the plural suffix being -innen). However, when questioning the German students in the class (the majority of which are female, like at home), they generally respond with indifference, saying that they DO feel included when they see a word like Studenten, Freunde, usw. and that they find the politically correct forms of StudentInnen or Student/innen to be cumbersome and stupid. More and more I am seeing that people of nowadays are actually less sensitive to the idea of language being dominated by masculinity, especially when feminizing it means making it more cumbersome. Although it is still definitely out there, it's clearly not as popular with the yoof of today as it was for those in the 60s.