WUNRN
With this boldness at the
top comes obedience at the bottom — 82 million Germans will wait at a
pedestrian red light, even with no car in sight.
But when it comes to
empowering women, no Teutonic drive or deference seems to work — even under one
of the world’s most powerful women, Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Many leaders in business and
politics profess to want to employ and promote women. But a decade of earnest
vows from the corporate sector has not dented male-dominated Deutschland AG.
“Germany is good at
structural reforms, but not at cultural reforms,” said Thomas Sattelberger,
human resource chief at Deutsche Telekom, which in spring 2010 stunned fellow
members of the DAX 30 index by announcing a voluntary goal of 30 percent female
managers by 2015.
“There is a very traditional
image of women and men that was taken to an extreme in the Third Reich: female
mother cult and male fraternity. These mental stereotypes have not yet been
culturally processed and purged.”
Alice Schwarzer, founder of
the magazine Emma and perhaps Germany’s best-known feminist, likens this
mindset to “a leaden blanket across all of German society.”
Despite a battery of
government measures — some introduced in the past year or so — and ever more
passionate debate about gender roles, only about 14 percent of German mothers
with one child resume full-time work, and only 6 percent of those with two. All
30 DAX companies are run by men. Nationwide, a single woman presides on a
supervisory board: Simone Bagel-Trah at Henkel.
Eighteen months after the
International Herald Tribune launched a series on the state of women in the
21st century with a look at Germany, the country has emerged as a test case for
the push-and-pull of economics and tradition.
For the developed world,
Germany’s situation suggests that puzzling out how to skirt or remove enduring
barriers to women’s further progress is one of the hardest questions to solve.
In all European countries,
from the traditionally macho southern rim to more egalitarian Nordic nations,
the availability and affordability of child care, intertwined with traditional
ideas about gender roles, proved key factors in determining gender equality.
The nature of male networks was another telling factor.
Women remain a striking
minority in top corporate echelons, even in fiercely egalitarian countries like
Sweden or the increasing meritocracy of the United States. Very few countries
approach 20 percent female representation on corporate executive boards.
Yet if Swedish executive
suites boast 17 percent women and the United States and Britain 14 percent, in
Germany it is 2 percent — as in India, according to McKinsey’s 2010 Women
Matter report.
One of the countries in most
need of female talent — at 1.39 the German birthrate is among the lowest in
Europe and labor shortages in skilled technical professions are already 150,000
— Germany is a place where gender stereotypes remain engrained in the mind, and
in key institutions across society.
HISTORY’S
LONG SHADOW
Germany’s mother myth did
not start with the Nazis, who awarded medals to fertile women and made Mother’s
Day a national holiday while fostering male bonding by organizing boys and men
in a range of militaristic clubs.
It did not end with them,
either. “We tried to distance ourselves from the Nazi era in every point but
this,” said Ute Frevert, Germany’s leading gender historian, and director of
the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human
Development in Berlin.
In the emotional and moral
vacuum left by the Holocaust in West Germany, the church was a powerful force.
In competition with the Communist East, where women were encouraged to work and
leave their children in state nurseries within weeks of giving birth, the 14-year
Christian Democratic reign of West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer,
institutionalized the old maxim of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” — or “children,
kitchen, church” — in a tax and education system that to this day nudges women
out of full-time work.
Married couples pay a joint
tax rate closer to the lower rate the two would pay individually. This
effectively subsidizes income
inequality between husband and wife, noted Holger Schmieding, chief
economist at Berenberg Bank. And most schools still end at lunchtime, which has
sustained the stay-at-home-mother image of German lore.
To that, add a women’s
movement that from 19th-century Social Democrats focused more on protecting
women and mothers from harsh capitalism than on the fierce egalitarianism of
American, British — or Soviet — counterparts.
“We are still very far from
a situation where it’s as normal for women as for men to want both a career and
family — even among young women,” said Angelika Dammann, the first and only
female board member at software giant SAP. “When you have children, you’re
expected to stay home for a significant period; otherwise you are considered a
bad mother.”
RESISTING
CHANGE?
Ms. Merkel has never used
the chancellery as a pulpit for gender equality. Herself childless, she
epitomizes the German career woman. The base of her party, Mr. Adenauer’s
Christian Democrats, remains attached to conservative family values.
But the chancellor is also a
child of East Germany, where women drove cranes. She is a physicist by
training. She made her sympathies plain by appointing women like the outspoken
Ursula von der Leyen, a mother of seven in favor of paternity leave and
boardroom quotas, to her cabinet.
As family minister in Ms.
Merkel’s first term, Ms. von der Leyen introduced a 14-month, generously paid
shared parental leave in 2007. Two months are reserved for the father; if he
does not take them, the government pays for only 12.
She also sponsored a law
promising every 1-year-old the right to a nursery place from 2013, and favors
all-day schooling — although actually enacting this is up to each of Germany’s
16 Länder, or states.
“Laws help change
mentalities,” Ms. von der Leyen has argued.
But Germany lags far behind
countries like the United States — where government aid for child care is scant
compared with Europe — in getting women into full-time work and senior
positions.
“Until not too long ago
German mothers had to choose: children or job,” said Ms. Schwarzer. “The modern
version of this choice is part-time work.”
Women may make up a third of
executives in small companies, but many of those are family owned. If 10
percent of board members are women, up from about 7 percent in 2001, most of
these are employee delegates who get seats under Germany’s model of managing
labor relations; on the corporate side, notes Elke Holst, research director of
gender studies at the German Institute for Economic Research, “We are still
where we were 10 years ago” — at 4 percent.
MALE
NETWORKS
According to Mr.
Sattelberger at Deutsche Telekom, corporate rituals from recruitment to
promotion to working hours retain a whiff of the 1950s, and male networks
remain close-knit.
“In the DAX companies, the
old social order is the most pervasive,” said Mr. Sattelberger. “This is a
place where male dominance, elitism, power and money all come together.”
A 2009 study commissioned by
the Ministry of Family illustrated this bias. The Sinus Sociovision institute
in Heidelberg surveyed male and female managers in German companies and
identified three patterns of thinking among male bosses: Those who simply don’t
think women are cut out for it; those who think they are, but fear their
colleagues don’t and worry about cohesion; and those who say that in theory
gender does not matter but in practice women who make it “overcompensate” and
are not “authentic.”
The upshot, says the
director of the institute, Carsten Wippermann, is that women who qualify in the
view of one type of manager are automatically disqualified by the view of
another. “Men can think of reasons against having women on boards and in
executive committees,” Mr. Wippermann told the German weekly Die Zeit. “But
none in favor.”
QUOTAS
There is now an explosive
national debate about affirmative action.
Deutsche Telekom has
practiced its version, imposing an internal quota on managers and headhunters.
If a short list does not have 30 percent female candidates, Mr. Sattelberger
says, it’s simply too short.
Ms. von der Leyen’s
successor at the Ministry of Family, Kristina Schröder, has asked all DAX
companies to report back with female targets by the end of the year, though
without dictating a figure.
But Ms. von der Leyen, now
Labor minister, is skeptical of this “Flexi-Quota.” She wants a Norwegian-style
legal quota, arguing that big business pledged 10 years ago to promote more
women and has little to show for it.
Recently, she and Viviane
Reding, vice president of the European Commission, wrote to all DAX companies,
urging them to adopt credible and ambitious female targets or risk Europe-wide
quotas.
This disagreement between
two high-profile ministers — and Ms. Merkel’s lack of intervention — are
indicative of widespread unease about quotas.
Most companies where German
women have made headway involve quotas, which most political parties also use.
Few bosses publicly dispute
a business case for mining female talent. “We are very interested in promoting
more qualified women,” said Dieter Hundt, who heads the Germany employers’
federation, the BDA.
Yet there are few fans of
quotas — either among the many white men in their 60s (or, in the case of Mr.
Hundt, their 70s) who run Deutschland AG, or among the few women.
Mr. Hundt is “categorically
opposed” to legislation. “Talented women surely don’t want to get a job because
of a quota?”
In the view of Mr. Hundt,
many women simply don’t want to climb to the top. “The demands of a top job are
particular: the traveling, the work hours, the toughness that is required in
such jobs,” he said. “That is also one reason why some women have less
ambitions for these jobs.”
Ms. Dammann, the board
member at SAP, is adamant she would not want to be a “quota woman.” She worries
that women lack confidence, networks and also the infrastructure at work to aim
high. Mentoring, job-sharing and a focus on achievement rather than hours in
the office, would help, she suggested.
Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller,
the chief executive of Trumpf, which makes laser-cutting tools and other
machinery, said men cannot be blamed for the lack of women in Germany’s
machine-tool industry. Too few women study technical and scientific subjects,
she said.
Her company gives employees
leeway to set work schedules in a bid to make it easier for women to become
managers.
Still, “there is a lack of
women who want to work full time,” she said. “We can’t tell women how to lead
their lives. We don’t want a system like in the old East Germany.”
The irony, said Jutta
Allmendinger, author of several studies on women in the former East and West,
is that state intervention appears to be most effective in battling
stereotypes. (To this day, eastern women are more mobile and are more likely to
have babies and reach management positions than westerners.)
“We need strong legislative
signals,” Ms. Allmendinger said.
At stake, Mr. Sattelberger says,
is simple economic interest: “Without these talent sources, Germany can’t
survive as a leading knowledge economy.
“We have to break open all
our historic taboos,” he said. “Because if we don’t, we will lose
competitiveness.”