From campaign speeches to corporate settings: How political anti-gender discourses can be mirrored in workplace contexts

In recent election campaigns in Bavaria, there has been an increase in anti-gender rhetoric that mobilizes against gender equality and feminist demands. This paper explores the extent to which discursive patterns related to anti-gender from election campaigns in Bavaria are reflected in the context of Bavarian workplaces, arguing that this interconnection is crucial to rising popularity of anti-gender discourses. It includes an approach to identifying and contextualizing discursive patterns of anti-gender in political and non-political contexts. In addition, it discusses how the same discourses are presented differently in political and non-political contexts. Using critical discourse analysis and drawing on social identity theory, patterns of gender discourses in political election campaign speeches from the 2023 Bavarian state election campaign and the 2024/2025 federal German election campaign are explored, contextualizing them specifically in the context of anti-feminism. These findings are compared in a discourse historical approach to discourses which were identified in data on company-internal communication a focus group study conducted with a southern German company and a story completion survey study conducted with employees in Bavaria. Preliminary findings suggest that anti-gender discourses in political campaigns are often accompanied by a populist approach, suggesting that “the elite” wants to make life more difficult for “ordinary people” through demands for equality and regulations. In internal corporate communications, this discourse is reflected in subtle appeals to tradition, meritocracy, and depolarization. This paper offers a novel understanding of how anti-gender discourses travel across sectors in Bavaria and reshape the overall understanding of gender over time.