BERLIN: Germany can boast a wealth of female talent in its government all the way to the top with Chancellor Angela Merkel, but its corporate boardrooms are still almost entirely all-male affairs. The remarkable lack of woman executives in Europe's biggest economy has sparked a groundswell of protest, with leading news magazine Der Spiegel calling in its current issue for a female quota to redress the imbalance. “Quotas should be a first-aid measure for a society that has held on to rigid ideas of gender roles for too long,” it wrote in an 11-page cover story entitled “Why Germany Needs A Woman Quota – A Manifesto”. “Equality, justice, role models – the debate about the quota involves everything because it would change this country from the bottom up. The effects would be seen everywhere – at the family breakfast table just as at the conference tables of the biggest companies.” But perhaps ironically, the idea has failed to win the support of Merkel, who is Germany's first woman chancellor and grew up in the communist east where gender equality in the workplace was more widespread than in the west. “The chancellor does not support the idea of a binding quota for the moment,” her spokesman Steffen Seibert told a regular news conference. “She is of the opinion that you have to give companies another chance” to rectify the under-representation of women. However he admitted that voluntary targets introduced in 2001 for companies to boost their ranks of female executives had produced “for the most part modest results”. The proportion of women on executive or supervisory boards at Germany's 200 biggest companies is currently at a dismal 3.2 percent, the German Institute for Economic Research said in its latest study released last month. Merkel's cabinet, by contrast, is one-third female but deeply divided on whether a quota is needed to promote fairness, pitting Family Affairs Minister Kristina Schroeder against Labor Minister Ursula von der Leyen. Von der Leyen has vocally backed a quota of 30 percent, saying industry had failed to hold up its end of the bargain in the 10 years since the voluntary measures were announced. But Schroeder wants to give them another grace period of two years, “then a legislative obligation will enter into force,” she said. – Agence France
