Pant suits and ravens - German women at work

Angela Merkel is arguably the most powerful woman in the world. You might assume that she is only the most accomplished of a long line of women executives, political leaders and academics. That's not the case. One of my biggest surprises in Germany is that women's equality seems a few decades behind where it should be. It's not an issue of rights; women can do everything that men can do here. It's just that they don't. There is a subtle sexism in German culture. At least I see it that way. Of course I went to a college where one of the most popular majors was Women's and Gender Studies and it was cool not to shave your armpits (I was never that cool).

I found some numbers that explain the issue:
Women make up only 4% of the management in Germany's top companies, according to the statistics.
Of the women who are employed, almost half of them work part-time. And women's wages are 22% lower than men's, a gap that is one of the biggest in Europe, after Austria.

There are efforts to try closing the professional gender gap. Starting in 2016, an affirmative action-style quota willrequire 30% of corporate board members to be female. But progress is slow.

You could blame it on babies. Right now, Germans have fewer babies than anyone else in Europe - 1.3 children per woman - so the government has created incentives to have kids. Moms have the right to year-long paid maternity leaves, the right to return to work part-time after having a baby and a guaranteed job to go back to for up to three years after the baby arrives. Once a woman has children, it's rare for her to keep working full-time. According to the NY Times, "only about 14 percent of German mothers with one child resume full-time work, and only 6 percent of those with two."

Don't get me wrong - I think children are wonderful and families are too. And it's great that in Germany there are policies that make it possible for parents to stay home with their kids. But I also think that there's an inequality here that makes it difficult for a woman to excel, that proverbial glass ceiling, that should have gone away 40 years ago. And the numbers of women in leadership are so small that I think the issue impacts all women, not just those with young children. So don't blame the babies.

What's the cultural, psychological root of the issue? I am not an anthropologist or a psychologist. In fact, I am not an ist of any kind, but I have read about one theory that seems to make sense.. The whole 3rd Reich era made gender roles different in Germany than in other Western countries. There was a 'cult of motherhood' where the Nazis encouraged men to go off to work and fight and women to raise little Aryan babies at home.

That mentality stuck around long after the war. Until 1957, women who wanted to work had to get official permission from their husbands. Even today, there's a word for women who leave their children to go to work: Rabenmutter. It's a raven mother, a horrible woman who doesn't love her kids and abandons them. We don't have this kind of an insult in the U.S. The closest thing is 'latch key kid', which no one actually says anymore. It sounded pretty cool when I was a little - being able to come home alone and having my own key.

The funny thing is that I am sitting at home writing this post while my husband is working. That's not the fault of a glass ceiling so much as my fault for being a foreigner. Compared to what most people with my level of language skill are doing, or what training process they have to go through to get a job, I am lucky working part-time at the international school. Otherwise I might be enrolled in a 3 year program training to be an apprentice window washer. If you have seen the windows in my apartment, you'd know that would be unfortunate.

So if your image of the German women has to do with pant suits and political power, you might be a little off base. The German women might have the power to eradicate men peeing while standing up, but so far they haven't broken in to the top levels of the working world. As you can tell, I find this topic interesting and read up on it as I was working on this post. It's a little nerdy, almost something you'd find in a Women's and Gender Studies class, minus the hairy armpits.

From the New York Times, 2011