It depends on the parking area if there are any legal means to enforce the reservation for women.

Once the owner admits that the StVO (the German road law) is valid (This is automatically the case if there are no effective borders to prevent access in contrast to e.g. parkhouses), the owner cannot prohibit the usage by men.  But if the owner has own terms (as being said, all parkhouses or working places with own parking places) the current law interpretation permits the owner to exclusively reserve places for women and according to a decision in 2011 it does not discriminate men.

The current state is that is not really enforced, but culturally accepted to give women a more secure feeling. These places are very near to the entrance, have good lighting and camera supervision. It is really more about a *secure feeling*, there is no statistical indication that attacks are prevented by those places nor that even attacks in parking houses are more common than in other places.

The actual usage is that it is impolite to use them as men if there are free places left, but once the places are full, they will be used, too.