The Atlantic Times, März 2009
Germany does not treat women well: They earn about 23 percent less than men. Women have long been appalled by this, rebuking men and the society they still dominate. Vladimir Spidla, EU commissioner for social affairs, has reprimanded Germany on a number of occasions because the national wage differential is much greater than the EU average of 17.4 percent.
Now Germany’s Minister for Family Affairs Ursula von der Leyen of the Christian Democrats has seized on women’s indignation around this issue and is campaigning with it. The previous SPD-Green coalition government “utterly failed” with its gender equality plans, she said.
A little bit more honesty would bring some objectivity into these strident disputes that pop up periodically. Anyone who reads the small print can find a more subtle explanation. There are still far too few young women who pursuing training and degrees in technical and scientific fields – despite the annual “girls days” meant to encourage them to do so. Instead, German women still have a tendency to pick sectors and careers that are traditionally paid less. Men are apparently more willing to relocate to take a better paying position elsewhere. And German mothers are more likely to have part-time jobs than French women, for example, and take a longer maternity leave before returning to work.
There is not enough research to say whether women make these decisions because the availability of full-day childcare is insufficient or as a deliberate choice for more personal time and less work. It may also be that an appreciable amount of women are not interested in pursuing a career, just as not every man wants to get to the top and most do not get there anyhow.
Those who do strive for higher positions, however, should not be held back by a lack of infrastructure. The chancellor candidate for the Social Democrats, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, wants to offer free full-day childcare from infancy onward. This would remove what women have recognized as a barrier for equal participation in the working world.
An as yet unpublished study by the management consulting firm Hay Group, cited by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, may quiet the superficial uproar over the 23 percent. The firm compared 70,000 salaries from 300 companies. When comparing only similar and equivalent positions, women earned 5 percent less. This is 5 percent too much and eliminating this disparity is naturally a goal for everyone. But the rest no longer belong in headlines or campaign ads – nor in Germany-bashing.