SPECIAL REPORT

Posted Sunday, January 22, 2006; 10.33GMT

	andreas pohLmann for time Job: Heads of family firm, Schönberger Woman’s Work: The sisters brought family-friendly policies to the metal-parts business

Somebody has to. Compared to many of its European neighbors, Germany is woefully undersupplied with day-care facilities. According to a 2001 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, just 10% of children under 3 have access to day care in Germany, compared with 64% in Denmark, 34% in the U.K. and 29% in France. Germany gave the world the word kindergarten, but the services they supply are limited. Most preschools turf their charges out at noon, forcing parents — usually mothers — to knock off work at lunch. Small wonder that employers are skeptical about employing mothers with small children.

When Karin Boenkost — a graduate mathematician and IT specialist, now 43 — got her first job in the accounts department of a major Frankfurt bank, she recalls getting along "really well" with her boss. After two months she informed him she was pregnant. She says that their working relationship lost its bloom and her initial contract was not renewed. A few years and two children later, Boenkost returned to work. Then, during a round of cutbacks, her bosses told her they would have to let her go. "The reason I was fired — they told me straight to my face — was that, unlike my male colleagues, I had always left the office on time because I had to pick up the kids," says Boenkost. She is now self-employed. Perhaps reflecting the challenges implicit in traditional careers, self-employment among German women has increased, up 60% in the past decade, twice the rise seen among women across Europe.

Not surprisingly, many German mothers see part-time jobs as the answer to the problem of finding a career. No less than 85% of part-time jobs are held by women, and one-third of all women in employment work part-time. In Sweden, by contrast, 71% of women are in full-time jobs — only 3% fewer than their male counterparts. Why the difference? One factor stands out: 85% of Swedish toddlers have places in child-care facilities. This is the fruit of long-established Swedish policies aimed at bringing mothers back into the workforce; provision of child care is key but so too is legislation to ensure family-friendly attitudes in the workplace. Swedish employers, for example, are required by law to permit parents of children up to 8 years old to work shorter hours. German business, by contrast, sets its own agenda — and with rigid attitudes to working hours and less than 2% of companies operating their own kindergartens or day-care centers, there's little to cheer working parents.

If having kids is a barrier to professional success for German women, opting to remain childless is no guarantee of equal treatment in the job market. Less than 11% of the seats on company supervisory boards are occupied by women, compared to 17.5% in the U.S. and 12.5% in the U.K. There isn't a single female CEO in the dax list of the top 30 German blue-chip companies. Those who slog their way through the ranks find their progress slower than that of their male equivalents, and their remuneration less generous. According to a 2005 study by Sonja Bischoff, an economics professor at Hamburg University, there are marked differences between the salaries of men and women in equivalent senior management positions. There are more than twice as many women as men earning less than €50,000 a year, while 1.5 times more male than female managers draw down salaries above €75,000 a year.

Even at the top of the corporate heap, says Regine Stachelhaus, 55, a senior executive at Hewlett-Packard Germany, women are "still not completely accepted." Stachelhaus remembers a meeting with a supplier some years ago. As she began to outline the agenda, he protested that she should wait until the company lawyer arrived. When she explained that she was handling the meeting alone, the supplier grunted: "Well, where Hewlett-Packard is concerned, nothing surprises me anymore."

plenty of german women, naturally, disprove traditional expectations. In 1985, Andrea Schönberger, 40, was the only woman enrolled in her year at the engineering department of Regensburg's University of Applied Sciences. At one point, a professor asked her if she had failed to learn her three Ks. "I had no idea what he was talking about," Schönberger recalls. "That was new to me — fancy learning about the facts of life at the late age of 22." She went on to get her diploma and, with her sister Sabine, 39, took over the metal-parts firm in Bavaria founded by their grandfather. The company recently won Germany's Most Family Friendly Firm award in recognition of measures the sisters introduced, such as free day care and kindergarten bonuses — employees with children of kindergarten age get a tax-free refund of the monthly kindergarten fee.

Yet the success enjoyed by the Schönbergers is still rare. For a country that has long prided itself on the quality of its science and technology, Germany still wastes too much of its brainpower. Just 9% of top chairs in math and the natural sciences in German universities are filled by women. In France, 30.7% of university science and math professors are women. Of the science researchers in Germany's universities, only 14% are women, compared with 44% in Ireland. Of Germany's university science professors, around 6% are women, half the percentages in Italy and the U.K.

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