Sunday, Jan. 22, 2006

Why Merkel Is Not Enough

By ANDREW PURVIS / Berlin

Germany's relations with the U.S. suffered a cold snap after the Iraq war. The last time a German Chancellor came to Washington, George W. Bush only managed to free up 20 frigid minutes for his visitor. But when Angela Merkel dropped by earlier this month, the President spent more than twice that time locked in private conversation with her. He later revealed they'd discussed her upbringing in communist East Germany. It's "uplifting to talk to somebody who knows the difference between just talking about tyranny and living in freedom," he said. But Merkel's birthplace is not the only biographical detail drawing attention as she takes her place on the international stage. Inevitably, as the first-ever woman to occupy Germany's Chancellery, she will be judged not only according to what she achieves but by the ways in which she leads the world's third largest economy. Her diplomatic skills have already been credited with bringing European Union leaders closer; a few days after her White House debut, she visited the Kremlin, and again impressed her hosts with deft criticisms of policies delivered in a spirit of cordiality. Back home, the economy is picking up, and Germans are starting to shed the gloom that enveloped the country in the months surrounding its messy election.

Watching Merkel, 51, and the five women — all experienced in state or federal government — she has installed in her new Cabinet, it's tempting to conclude that Germany, like its Scandinavian neighbors to the north, is enjoying the blessings of years of struggle for gender equality. Not so. The hard-won achievements of German women are limited, to a startling degree, to the world of politics. And even within government, females encounter hostility from traditionalists who expect them to be at home rather than in the corridors of power. In most other fields, German women lag behind their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. They tend to be paid less, lose their jobs faster and stay out of work longer — and in all economic measures, they fare far worse than German men (earning 12% less on average, according to the Institute for Labor Market and Professional Research). In a survey of women's presence in the workforce sponsored by the World Economic Forum last year, Germany placed 20th out of 58 developed and developing countries. The same survey ranked German women 28th in job opportunities and 34th in educational attainment. Fewer women were elected to the Bundestag last year than in 2002. Only 21% of the top jobs in the German corporate world and in public service are filled by women, and female CEOs are rarer than hen's teeth. Will Germany's first first lady make a difference?

She has ample reasons to try. No rapidly aging society — and Germany is one — can afford to waste the economic potential of half its population. But if Germany is to get the most out of its women, it needs to provide them with adequate opportunities to work. At present, it doesn't do so. Indeed, the country risks being trapped in a vicious cycle; those women who are wooed into the workplace find it so difficult to combine family and work that, increasingly, they choose not to have children. That just exacerbates the demographic challenge.

Of German women aged 34-40, 30% are childless, twice as many as in France. Among academics and top managers, the percentage is higher still. If birthrates continue to decline, the country will one day have a workforce too small to support the social and medical programs that its elderly will need. Previous governments have sounded the alarm about this scenario — and then done little or nothing about it. Child-care provision remains poor, and there are few incentives to help women go back into work once they have started families. If Merkel uses her leadership to find ways in which women can be better integrated into the economy, she will go down in history for a lot more than her gender.

The new Chancellor still appears nonplussed by the male-dominated world she has inhabited since her native East Germany was subsumed into its capitalist alter ego. In the communist world of her youth, women went out to work — and often looked after the house, too. But when the Wall came down in 1989, Merkel found herself in a society that chanted the mantra of the famous "three Ks" — Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) — as a prescription for the priorities its female citizens were expected to observe.

Last year's elections showed how little attitudes have changed since reunification. Merkel's campaign manifesto mentioned policies for women just three times; she was subjected to media criticism of her fashion sense and her private life (she has no children and her husband shuns a public role); and Doris Schröder-Kopf, the spouse of her rival, then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, seemed to wonder aloud if the childless Merkel could really understand the needs of German mothers: "Frau Merkel doesn't represent most women's experiences," Schröder-Kopf sniped. Even among members of Merkel's own party, the Christian Democratic Union (cdu), support for her candidacy was weak. Some senior figures withheld their backing simply because they were "unable to accept a woman in this position," a senior cdu official told Time.

Having beaten tough odds to lead her country, Merkel now faces an even tougher challenge: shifting Germans' entrenched attitudes to gender roles. Dozens of women across Germany in all walks of life, interviewed by Time, spoke of persistent stereotypes that they say dictate and circumscribe opportunities for women. Most potent of these, perhaps, is an idealized image of motherhood still predicated on the three Ks. "The Mutterkreuz ideology still lingers," says Barbara Bierach, 50, an author from Munich living in New York City. That ideology, which has its roots deep in German culture and takes its name from medals for motherhood handed out during the Third Reich, holds that women are biologically predestined to bear and nurture children to adulthood. Bierach, who wrote a book called The Stupid Sex (about women, not men) in 2002, says that German women are just as likely to propagate the idea as their male compatriots: "Career mothers' worst enemy is not the testosterone-ridden boss but the neighborhood earth mother," she says. "If a mother is not home at 1 p.m. to cook spaghetti for her kids she is judged to be a Rabenmutter." (The word translates as raven mother, a slur based on the misconception that the jet-black birds neglect their young.) It's a phrase heard often in German debates on the role of women. Says Renate Künast, 50, the co-chair of the Green Party's parliamentary group in Berlin, "The word must be dropped from the German vocabulary. The word Rabenvater [raven father] does not even exist." Yet the surprising thing is this: far from challenging stereotypes, says Martina Ritter, a sociologist at the Fulda University of Applied Sciences, younger Germans seem to be embracing them, and participating in a "re-traditionalization of gender roles in German families." Two recent studies, one commissioned by Germany's Family Ministry, found that even couples who believe in sexual equality revert to traditional roles the moment their first child is born. The State Institute for Family Research, based in Bamberg, Bavaria, notes that "there is a remarkable tenacity in the traditional division of labor in families." Nearly 80% of men surveyed by the Institute praised parental leave, but few took the option themselves — mostly because they earn more than their partners, say researchers. Ulla Bock, a sociologist at the Free University in Berlin, put the point starkly: "There are these weird breaks in emancipatory progress, and we are in one," she says. "There are more and more young people who want to live according to the old values."

this new conservatism may be exacerbating a trend among working women to abandon thoughts of child rearing for fear of failing to fulfill their maternal role. The number of new births has dropped from 18.1 children per 1,000 inhabitants at the peak of Germany's baby boom in 1963 to an all-time low of 8.6 — among the lowest in Europe. Of the country's childless 28-year-olds, 83% hold jobs, while only 38% of its 28-year-old mothers are employed. That explains why Ursula von der Leyen, 47, Germany's new Family Minister, says: "The question is not whether women will work or not. They will work. The question is whether they will have children or not."

Of course, plenty of German women do both. Von der Leyen herself had seven children while building a career in medicine before she entered politics as State Minister for Family, Women, Health and Social Affairs in Lower Saxony in 2003. But her situation is far from typical. She spent her childhood in Belgium, where the concept of the Rabenmutter doesn't seem to have taken hold, and is rich enough to pay for child support when she's out helping to run the country. And she knows that she's a rarity. Indeed, Von der Leyen worries that so few women leaders have children, and that so few mothers are in positions of power. "In Germany, we've made a childless lifestyle almost a prerequisite for a good career and the ability to take on a position of leadership," the Minister says. "Of course this gives a fatal signal to young people between 20 and 25 — if you don't want to rule out becoming Chancellor one day, you are better off not having children."

That message echoes from workplace to school gates. "I was often asked why I was having children if I didn't take care of them," recalls Kerstin Niethammer-Jürgens, 46, a lawyer and mother of five from Berlin. "I never heard these remarks from men, only from women. Perhaps they envied me, but my impression was that they had this basic conviction that a mother must not act that way, that it could not be good for children." Mirjam Heydorn, 51, a lawyer and mother of two in Frankfurt, agrees. "You are reproached from all sides," she sighs. Heydorn remembers once asking a judge to reschedule a court appointment so that she could attend to her child. He replied, "Are you a mother or a lawyer?" Heydorn said, "Are you a judge or a father?" Predictably, the judge told her his wife was home taking care of the kids.

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.

Margret Wintermantel, 58, president of the University of Saarland, says that little effort has been made to accommodate women with children in the scientific research community. Unforgiving hours exacerbate the problem. "It's like a race you cannot win unless you are always there," she says. Elke Geenen, 51, knows what that feels like. After finishing her geology degree, she switched to the social sciences because of jibes from male students. They would ask us, "What kind of women are you to study geology?," says Geenen, now a lecturer in sociology at the University of Kiel. "We were deemed too physically weak to carry the tools and instruments," she says. "In the end, I just couldn't bear that kind of treatment, nor the prospect of later working in an environment that would be just as hostile." Heike Maria Kunstmann, 39, director general of the Berlin-based Gesamtmetall, the employers' association for the metal and electrical industry, says she wanted to study science but steered clear because the subject is "considered to be so ur-male." She opted for microeconomics instead.

Granted, the Schönberger sisters, Geenen and Kunstmann all completed their studies years ago. So did Merkel, who earned a Ph.D. in physics at Leipzig University. So have things now changed? Less than you might think. Sarah Steinmann, 27, is just finishing her graduate degree in math at Bonn University. There are 728 students on her course; only 196 are women. "By and large, the professors didn't have anything against female students," she says. "In fact, some seemed to prefer the female students since they consider them to be less lazy." In that, the teachers are correct; female students of math and the sciences complete their studies faster than their male counterparts. The trouble starts at graduation. "For the guys, there is hardly ever any question that they are going to do a Ph.D. after the diploma exams," says Steinmann. "The girls, however, will debate with themselves whether it's possible to both do a Ph.D. and have a baby." Steinmann herself cops to the dilemma. "If I go on to do a Ph.D.," she says, "it'll take me around four years to complete it. I don't think it would then make sense to stay home and have kids. So it's either kids or an academic career for me."

What can be done? Merkel's government has already made some modest proposals to ease life for working mothers — and fathers. Keeping alive a pledge made by Schröder's Social Democratic Party, the new government promised to add 230,000 additional places for children under 3 in creches, kindergartens or home day care by 2010. Merkel has also mooted introducing a 12-month allowance for parents who stay at home during the first year of their child's life. But such measures may not be enough to persuade Steinmann's generation to reconsider combining career and children. Nor has the government yet given a lead on how to tackle institutional and social prejudices against women in the workplace.

Time's interviewees had views on what might bring about a change of culture. Bierach, the author, emphasized the need for equal access to education: "Women in leading positions all come from families where education is gender blind. They all have had a fantastic education," she says. Hewlett-Packard's Stachelhaus advises women to look for jobs in companies and sectors where women are already well represented. Kunstmann suggests that women who want to make their way to the top should not "try to behave like a man. Dare to be different, to be a woman."

Yet in the teeth of deep-rooted cultural beliefs and social habits, such advice won't be enough. Still, it doesn't hurt. Consider the new Chancellor. Merkel was "smarter, more cooperative" than Schröder in the election, says Luise Pusch, a linguistics professor. "The more frequently she is in the media spotlight, the more her style of communication will catch on." In fact, to some extent, it already has. The Chancellor's quiet attention to detail and instinctive quest for consensus, once identified as weaknesses by political commentators, are now approvingly dubbed the "Merkel method." "She's plenty capable," says another new admirer, President Bush. "She's got a kind of spirit to her that is appealing." Spirit and political savvy are what she'll need to prove herself more than just a role model for German women. And if her government creates better opportunities for women, the whole country will benefit.

With reporting by William Boston and Regine Wosnitza/Berlin, Julia Mason/Paris, Ulla Plon/Copenhagen, Ursula Sautter/Bonn and Elaine Shannon/Washington