With the German government’s plans to introduce quotas for women in company boardrooms seemingly stalled, equality of the sexes could first make advances on the streets: in Dortmund, politicians are debating the introduction of a 50 per cent gender quota for traffic-light icons.
In a joint application to the city council, local politicians from the Social Democratic and Green parties argued that “since we give equal treatment to men and women, it would be consistent to partially modify traffic-light men to traffic-light women”.
The bid for replacing so-called Ampelmannchen with Ampelfrauen has as much to do with road safety as feminist principles: since the proposed female version would wear a skirt, it would release more light and be much more visible.
The use of Ampelfrauen is already widespread on the streets of Bremen, Cologne, Dresden, Kassel, Magdeburg and Zwickau.
The most common pedestrian icon is a modification of the East German Ampelmannchen , which was designed by East German traffic psychologist Karl Peglau in 1961 and has since attained cult status across the country. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014
