Unfortunately, our female colleagues in the industry are still vastly outnumbered. This makes it all the more important for us, as an industry and as an association, to raise their profile and dispel the image of this as a male-dominated profession, both internally and externally.

Some of you may never have noticed: Alongside the tonmeister.org URL, we also operate the female version of this domain, the tonmeisterin.org. And in the past—admittedly very subtly—we would alternately mention one or the other domain in our newsletter, as well as on business cards and in email signatures. Unfortunately, it no longer makes sense to continue this lovely practice.

Search engines penalize us with a lower ranking if we operate two nearly identical domains. As a result, our website becomes less visible to the outside world. A male and a female version of the website therefore has exactly the opposite effect to the one we are aiming for. This will come to an end shortly. In the future, the URL “tonmeisterin.org” will simply redirect to the main website “tonmeister.org”. We will look for other ways to better reflect the ‘girl power’ of the industry to the outside world and, hopefully, to introduce more young women to the many opportunities and professional joys of our profession. We’d be delighted to receive any suggestions at our office!

What will remain is the option for every member to set up their own email address with the female domain “tonmeisterin.email”. Incidentally, male colleagues are also welcome to do this, thereby demonstrating that they, too, can happily live with the generic feminine form (while women in most cases still have to accept the generic male form in business language). But one thing is certain above all: We all bring about the most lasting change in our industry by dispelling gender stereotypes through positive professional practice.

For anyone interested in the technical background:

Google does explicitly support so-called "canonicals"—that is, the operation of websites with duplicate content—but only if the content is actually identical. However, due to the way we manage our content and the technical structure of the website, we cannot guarantee this, as some links are generated automatically. Therefore, the only option moving forward will be to implement a hard redirect (301) from “tonmeisterin.org” to “tonmeister.org”.