Senta Trömel-Plötz

Trömel-Plötz studied linguistics in the USA. She received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania with the dissertation, Simple Copula Structures in English.[2] This was followed by her habilitation. From 1980 to 1984 she was a professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Konstanz. The professorship was not converted into a permanent position. Trömel-Plötz believes that anti-feminist beliefs at the time prevented her being given tenure. She then chose to move to the USA for better opportunities at Universities. Since then she has worked as a freelance linguist, author, and professor. She has published numerous publications in the fields of formal linguistics, psycholinguistics, and feminist linguistics.

Trömel-Plötz now lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Her sociolinguistic text Linguistics and Women's Language, which was published for the first time in 1978[3] in the journal Linguistic Reports, broke new ground for feminist linguistics in German-speaking countries. This essay proposed "a problematic conflation of grammatical and biological gender" for the first time. Trömel-Plötz "initiated the debate about the supposedly gender-neutral generic masculine and criticized the fact that this form does not seem gender-neutral but conceptually erases women."[4]