German women struggling for equality

It overhauled a rigid labour market and raised the retirement age to 67 with little fuss. Most recently, it simply decided to abandon nuclear power.

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 last year stunned fellow members of the DAX 30 index by announcing a voluntary goal of 30 per cent 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.”

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 government measures and ever more passionate debate about gender roles, only about 14 per cent of German mothers with one child resume full-time work, and only 6 per cent 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.

In Sweden executive suites boast 17 per cent women and the US and Britain 14 per cent, but in Germany the figure is 2 per cent, the same as India.

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 organising 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 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 subsidises 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.

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, the 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 favour of paternity leave and boardroom quotas, to her cabinet.

But Germany still lags far behind countries like the US in getting women into full-time work and senior positions.

A 2009 study commissioned by the Ministry of Family illustrated this bias when it 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,” said Wippermann “But none in favour.”

There is now an explosive national debate about affirmative action. Deutsche Telekom has practised its version, imposing an internal quota on managers and headhunters. If a short-list does not have 30 per cent female candidates it’s simply too short. The Ministry of Family has asked all DAX companies to report back with female targets.

Yet there are few fans of quotas – either among the many white men in their 60s or among the few women. Dieter Hundt, who heads Germany’s employers’ federation, is “categorically opposed” to legislation: “Talented women surely don’t want to get a job because of a quota?”

At stake, says Deutsche Tele koms’ Sattelberger, 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 because if we don’t, we will lose competitiveness.”