German women still rooted in mother cult

Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, does not lack pluck: it rebounded from two world wars, digested reunification and has now powered ahead of neighbors still reeling from the financial crisis. It overhauled a rigid labor 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 in spring 2010 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. 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 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.

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 per cent women and the United States and Britain 14 per cent, in Germany it is 2 per cent – 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 labour 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.

Mother myth

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 Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

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.”

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

As family minister in Merkel’s first term, 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 favours all-day schooling – although actually enacting this is up to each of Germany’s 16 Lander, or states.

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  Schwarzer. “The modern version of this choice is part-time work.”

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 per cent female candidates, Sattelberger says, it’s simply too short. Von der Leyen’s successor at the Ministry of Family, Kristina Schrder, has asked all DAX companies to report back with female targets by the end of the year, though without dictating a figure.

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-Kammuller, 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.
At stake, 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.”