Gender equality
Parental leave, financial support and easier access to early-years and pre-school childcare have strengthened the basis for women’s equality, as required by the Basic Law The Basic Law The Basic Law determines that Germany is a constitutional state: All state authorities are subject to judicial control. Section 1 of the Basic Law is of particular relevance. It stipulates that respect for human dignity is the most important aspect of the constitution: “Human dignity shall be… Read more › .
How many women sit on the board of a company in Germany?
While young women haven’t merely caught up with but in some cases have actually overtaken young men in the area of education (women accounted for 55 percent of people with a university entrance qualification and 53 percent of university graduates in 2023), there are still gender disparities with respect to earnings potential and career paths: women in full-time employment earn on average just 80 percent of the salary earned by their male colleagues. Women are still under-represented in managerial roles. According to a report from the AllBright Foundation, only one in five board members in Germany’s largest companies is a woman.
Is there a quota for women on executive boards in Germany?
Since 2015, a law has been in place to ensure equal participation of women and men in leadership positions, in both the private and public sectors. Among other things, it stipulates that 30 percent of supervisory board positions in publicly traded companies must be filled by women. In the autumn of 2020, the governing coalition agreed to introduce a quota for board membership, stipulating that in publicly traded and equally co-determined companies with more than three board members, one member must be a woman. In 2021, the second Leadership Positions Act came into force, laying down further requirements for more gender equality in the executive and supervisory boards of major German companies, for companies in which the federal government Federal Government The Federal Government and cabinet is made up of the Federal Chancellor and the Federal Ministers. While the Chancellor holds the power to issue directives, the ministers have departmental powers, meaning that they independently run their respective ministries in the framework of those directives… Read more › holds a stake and for certain top-level positions in the civil service. The proportion of women in the Bundestaghas dropped again recently and is currently 32.4 percent. That said, until 1983 less than 10 percent of MPs were female.
How women in Germany work
In recent years, the employment rate among women aged 15 to 64 in Germany has risen to 74 percent and is thus nearing the figure for men. The majority of women who work are in part-time employment.
Women in Germany devote 72 billion hours per year to caregiving and family-related activities - that’s more than all the hours of work done by those in gainful employment in Germany put together. However, more and more women want to pursue gainful employment and expect to be able to reconcile the demands of family life and developing a career.
Women in Germany spend roughly 29 hours per week doing unpaid caregiving work, while the figure for men is just under 20 hours. On average, women devote 43.4 percent more time per day to unpaid caregiving than men do. This equates to a difference of 76 minutes per day. The good news is that the gap between women and men in terms of unpaid work has narrowed over time: in 2012/13, the gender care gap was still 52.4 percent.
