Time Mag cover story: Working women in Germany

sorry you meant it to mean its worst...

"But watch it - men get used to that role very easily, and still don't do things the way we women probably would (weird, and stereotypical, but true - men have a hard time multi-tasking)"

if thats a positive statement about the ability of males also to run a household and look after children, i'd hate to see a negative one.

Yep, and the former Minister of Economics (Wiesheu, you know, the one who caused a fatal accident when drunk back in the 80's) suddenly quit the gov'mt and joined the Deutsche Bahn AG at top-management level was the main lobbyist for the Transrapid. But as you said, different thread. Just worth mentioning. And yes, he will receive a pension for his time as MP and Minister.

agh - I was also referring to more how difficult it can be for women to have to give up control of that part of their lives. (don't do things the way we probably would) based on mine and friends of mine's experiences.
And I said I knew it was stereotypical. I did not mean to mean its worse. Just because I am not praising men over everything does not mean the worst. .. geez.
It works best for us when both of us are working - yes I believe in good day care and that it can provide positive aspects of life and childhood that a stay at home parent might not

That is easy. If you had more money, then you would go spend that money in other countries and not here.

All those that complain about the high taxes are fooling yourselves as to just how much tax you were actually paying for example in the states versus what your "ROI" was. The US is full of hidden costs and the return is minimal to say the least.

@SARA

of course he will, because he was an MP and a minister...duh...and theres nothing wrong with people with the necesary expertise getting jobs after they leave government, u want them in McDonalds serving u Mcshit ? although that would have it's benefits...

jesus, I find it incredibly easy to give up cleaning
it's lemon fucking squeazy
in fact, it's one of the easiest things I've ever had to do

its hard to give up ironing - if you've never done it in the first place

is that because a woman's instintive natural place is in the home? dont give us the blame if you're fighting a million years of evolution everytime we decide to do the household...

This was a rat leaving Stoiber's sinking ship for greener pastures and getting put in charge of a project which he had initiated as a civil servant. Not so much training as creating a need which only you can fulfill. But it's all off topic. Use just one year's subsidy of this monster project for child care and lots of people would be much happier and better off.

off-topic


bit like Schröder and his gas pipeline

a rapid rail link to the airport would make me quite happy prob

/off-topic

She's not speaking for all women, gids, and I totally disagree with you DDBug FWIW.
I for one have never figured out why having tits and a fanny is supposed to make me better at doing the washing up than (e.g.) my ex
I mean, why???

because youre tits and fanny enable you to multitask, apparently.
multitask; the abiltity to do everything at the same time and never finish any of it.

I have no problems fighting mr ddbug to do the household ! More power to him! Someone has to work the iron (cuz I certainly can't!)

@ Topsy - I really never meant to say that women should be in the home, are better homemakers, etc.
I just wanted to say that men and women do things differently, and that women should realize this. It took me years to get over mr ddbug spending 4 hours cleaning a bathroom instead of taking care of several things at once, as I would. It's just different the way he did things.

And he does clean better than I do, fine with me though - we don't need a mechanical dishwasher anymore

thats called 'having a relationship'. Which are great IMO

especially when you can get rid of the dishwasher

youre kidding, the guy who invented the dish washer should earn a nobel peace prize... he's saved more marriges than viagra.

In regards to the thread title, men make the best chefs, women make the best babies and the Church decided which one was the most important to mankind. It is all the Churches fault!

That is not true, if I had more money I wouldn't have to buy my clothes in Canada and could afford to buy things here. Assuming the flight home would take place regardless.

I worked out that assuming I had the same gross income in Canada as I do here (which I could easily do) that in the span of 5 years I will make €10,000.00 less in net income. €10,000.00! Not to mention the extremely high cost of living in comparison.

Wow, I didn't know Canada cost so much.

either that or I don't earn squat

Oh to make a remark about "multitasking" using "tits" and "fanny"

I'm almost surprised its only 10000 over 5 years maybe. Thats 'only' just over €150 per month. You'd save a lot on top of that due to the cost of housing etc as you say

EDIT actually 150 month could easily be 5-8% of a salary so quite considerable really. Just ignore what I said

its the erogenus zones dear. you're all used to having 'em all tweaked at the same time. us blokes are happy if our zone number one gets enough attention.

I'm a little reluctant to post here as I'm sure many people will interpret what I write as insulting when it is simply my thoughts based on a stack of statistics i read over lunch.

1. A lot of affluent ( or effluent if you're from the suburbs of Melbourne) western mothers simply don't want to work even if they have the choice to.
I went to nationmaster and looked at the statistics on women in the labour market. I looked at many different statistics but have chosen just one to illustrate a point. For women in the 30 to 34 year age bracket ( I chose this as being typical young mother age), the greatest participation in the work force is not in the countries you would expect but in former eastern block countries (levels of 85% plus participation in the labour force). The Nordic countries slide into this level of participation as well. When you look at western countries such as; Germany, the US, Australia, England, Canada etc. you find the participation rates in the range 70 to 85%. Muslim nations fall way back with very low participation rates.

The former soviet women work because they have to (they need the money), the western women work out of choice (they want the extra money) and the Muslim women don't work because of cultural restrictions.

.It's all about proles, western economies are fast running out of drones. Merckle is raising the issue more out of economic necessity rather than out of concern for working mothers to have choice. Providing them with perfect choices ( ie enough child care places etc for all) will not necessarily increase the participation rate of women.

2. The traditional stereotype of the father working and the mother staying at home with the kids may not be just outdated oppressive form of the ideal family model. It may simply be following Occums razor;

" The simplest solution is often the best"

Or to put it another way, even if given the perfect choice between, staying at home with the kids, working part time with child care, working full time with child care, father staying at home and mother working full time, and all sorts of combinations in between, many women will still choose the traditional role as it's the easiest, less complicated solution.

3. Education. Not all women are as extremely well educated as TT women. Participation rates increase for all countries with increase education levels. People want to work if the work is exciting and interesting. Faced with the choice of working for example on a factory process line or staying at home with the kids when the difference between the two is just a few dollars, I'd choose the stay at home option.

To sum up. giving families ( note the use of the word families) an option of choosing the model for their family working arrangements is a good thing. Thinking that by doing this you will increase women's labour participation rates to those equal to men is delusional.

me, too.

its slightly a chicken and egg thing I think bucket. You are prob right to an extent about the educational thing. But if women are conditioned to think they will have to stay at home and produce kids then they probably won't bother that much with education and will therefore end up fulfilling the propechy and maintaining the cycle so to speak. So you have to try and break the cycle somewhere (unless you want to maintain the status quo of course)

why break it? we have yet to see the results of continued parental (i include grandparents in this) absence on such a mass scale as is now having to be practiced.

i actually agree, for once, with you on that.

equal opportunities?

Who said parents and grandparents are absent on a mass scale when both parents have jobs? My in-laws are here every wednesday, my father in law picks up the kids, hangs out and then takes the youngest to "turnen" while my mother in law irons (my happy secret until now). This was all their idea.
Every day when the kids get home I am here, and the evenings are spent on "quality time" because we don't have a tv and have to actually spend time with each other. Rather than my mom who, even when she wasn't working, would flip on the tv so we would be out of her hair.
Tonight I have a meeting, so my husband will be home, he will probably want to go to the hideout tomorrow, so I will probably take the kids out or eat or *gasp* watch a movie with them (highly recommend the weeping camel, btw).

is that like 'the lodge'

you're lucky to have a nuclear family so close and activley involved in the family. its no longer the norm. i meant mass as in very widespread practice, note mass as in time spent away by a parent. anyhows you're doing what we end up doing aswell juggling everything at the same time as dancing. the only difference is, you touch my dishwasher and your arse is toast.

At the end of the day, it is all about choices and thank goodness some of us are in a place to do so. I cannot justify how it may feel to be a parent and wanting to provide the best to our children but I am sure there are people out there that do not have these choices. Sometimes we should really count our blessings. Again, I have no children but I remember living in a Mayan village and working for a social program there. My colleague, a Mexican lady, heard that there was a child chained up at home while the mother went into town to handle her daily things. My colleague and I went all over town searching for this family. My colleague was a local social worker and in the end there was no way we could help this family further. We could only advise the family not to keep the child chained up during the day and perhaps to take her along. Basically the town had no resources for the mother besides the town could not even provide basic resources like running water or food. All I can say is from my perspective that I think it is a luxury to have the right or the choice to certain decisions, even though, they might not be the most ideal to our own needs.

I got a real wake-up call when I was in the US (home) for Christmas. I saw a lot of relatives I don't usually see (mine and husband's) because they wanted to meet the new baby.

I was totally unprepared for the question: "So you're a stay-at-home-mom, then?" Eliza was 5 months old!

It's crazy in America. So many people have themselves mortgaged and otherwise in debt up to the hilt, they're terrified of losing their jobs and just can't afford to take even a couple of extra months off work to take care of a child or any other life issue. This is why women work until their water breaks, put infants in child care at 6 weeks, and pay $1,000 or so a month for the priviledge. If you don't do that personally, you get people wondering how you can afford to be a "stay-at-home-mom."

I think Germany probably does go too far the other way - in trying to help out families (with Kinder- and Erziehungsgeld, 3-year stay-home and don't lose your job, Mutterschutz, etc.), it turns out to be a real disadvantage to women who want to have families but are also trying to get a job. As a currently pregnant friend of mine who has a career says, she used to think Germany's laws were liberal. Now she thinks they're just paternal.

Quitting my job and staying at home would not ensure that my kids had more contact with family members- no matter where I lived. Sending them to a day care facility ensures that they have peer contact and develop their linguistic skills. If I lived in a "rough" neighborhood, I may have chosen to keep them home.

No worries about the dishwasher though - I am allergic to houshold appliances (except the oven).

you're also a family member, i hope? no its about people whether through choice or necessity putting their six months old child in a totaly strange no "family" enviroment for the amount of time they do. im personaly worried that we may be creating more problems than we are solving by this, such as they breakdown in social structure etc loss of respect and manners. i know of a couple of families that now regret having made such descisions. as for peer group etc etc, i've found that families that have a stay at home PERSON, seem to have a much greater developed nieghbourly peer group due to the greater social contact created with more people being at home. its the big ADS discussion all over again i suppose.

Oh well - I guess we agree to disagree. My kids are doing well, better than some I know with a stay at home mom. Totally bilingual, 1s and 2s in school, lots of friends, and are just plain normal great kids (no kid is perfect, and no parent is perfect). I honestly do not believe they would be better off if I quit working and was unhappy, intellectually unstimulated, hating if I had to drag myself to a playground to do mommy talk or whatever, and constantly cook, clean, and do housework. nahhhh. Unhappy mommies make unhappy kids. I don't even know if I would have the discipline or ability to stimulate them properly, start a play group (agh) or do the cookies at the playground thing.
Furthermore, I admire and respect people who work with kids and know that they have training in areas of child development that most parents do not have.

PS - yes I am a family member, and still the one they probably spend the most time with. More than with the kita teachers that's for sure.

ahhh but you'll never know eh? would they have been better if you'd have been there? the good stopping the best? no seriously i have no problem with it and dont disagree with your choice, i dont believe your really the sort of person im worried about. youve done what families have been (forced) to do for centuries, which is use the extended family as a caring system. grandmas uncles aunts etc though all have an emotional commitment that goes beyond the call of a paid and qualified carer.

gideon - I didn't always have it though - and there was a time when I was home, alone. Believe me - it's much better for us this way. The grandparents are great - but not an integral part of our daycare (we could do this without them, they are a bonus though)

Don't believe the hype. My wife and I live in Southern California, and after my wife had her first baby, she only got 6 weeks off of work, and of those 6 weeks, she had to use up all her sick time for two of the weeks, and the other 4 weeks were paid by SDI (CA state disability Insurance) at a rate of about 1/4 her normal salary. I was allowed to take only 1 week off (utilizing my sick time) after the arrival of my new son, because I hadn't been working at the new company for the required 12 months to be allowed more time off.

After 6 weeks, she had three options:

1) Go back to work
2) Quit her job
3) Take up to 12-16 months of UNPAID family leave (newly introduced law here in the states)

She decided to do #2, because #3 was highly discouraged by her employer, as they would have had to allow her to return to work after a year. She knew she would have been passed over for any raises or promotions, therefore she decided to Quit and concentrate on our new baby.

Our second baby was born about 2 years later. She was not working at the time, and the state of California provided no assistance whatsoever. I suppose if we were both unemployed, we may have qualified for some type of minimal state welfare or assistance; however, I was working at the time and had a good paying job and insurance. This time, I qualified for more time off; however, my employer strongly discouraged me taking more than a week off. They never said it directly, but would indirectly imply that my position would be in jeopardy should I take more than a week off. I ended up taking one week off (again using up 1/2 of my years allotment of sick time) upon the arrival of my 2nd son. Even if I had taken more than 1 week off, it would have cut into my vacation time (which is 10 days per year for the first five years of employment at almost every company here in California).

I work for a very large company based in California. It is my understanding that my experience is fairly typical here.

Furthermore, childcare is almost prohibitively expensive here in the states, unless you can find some type of subsidized program (usually reserved for lower income brackets). We pay $400/month to have my oldest son (2 yrs old) attend (2) half days per week at the local Kindercare.

I am hoping to pursue a PhD in Germany in the very near future, I sure hope the childcare situation is better over there!

Interesting article in The grauniad today. Germanys birth rate

I like how the attibuted the cause by many factors- like we discussed- lack of quality childcare, short school hours and employers attitudes.
Seriously, I am at the age thinking of having a child, and I know I will NOT do it here. As I don't want to live on Welfare.

Cheers Allershausen for flagging that article up!
Really interesting stuff.

yes read this on the s-bahn on the way in. what i thought was interesting and something we rarley cover in or nags at each other were two things, the quote "It shows the deep contempt with which raising children is regarded" which i feel has a large element of truth in it, and also the aspect of males being unsure of their ability to perform the role of fathership... but thats another thread.

What, so you don't want high-quality subsidised daycare in a Kinderkrippe, Kindergeld each month, or the opportunity to take time off without losing your job?

I went to an event at my son's Krippe yesterday and among the other mothers there were a lawyer, a doctor, a university lecturer...all German, by the way.

we pay 30 euros a month for my wee 'un old to attend a playgroup two mornings a week. for those complaining about becoming poor and shit about how bad germany is do the maths. yep aou need to have both people working if those are your costs.

Few interesting things in the article, though most of it has been said before.

I think the last point is important and overlooked. If you graduate at 22, which is quite common in the English speaking countries, then a woman can have 10 years of career before thinking about having a family, and not have to worry about the biological clock. After 10 years of career, many women and men are indeed ready to make career sacrifices for the sake of a family. German women, and men, are graduating much later and seem to have to spend some time doing a couple of Praktiken before getting their first "proper job".

I think the influence of good childcare facilities on the birthrate is overemphisised. Look at the figures.


Ireland has probably the worst childcare facilities in western Europe, yet still tops the league. Why is that? I don't know, but I would think the young university leaving age, the relative job security and (dare I say it) the traditional, conservative outlook all play a greater role than the lack of childcare facliities. Of course the lack of childcare faclities makes life difficult for women, and families in general, once they have children. But it's not keeping the birthrate down.

France is second in the table and has very good childcare. The UK is also quite high up. I would bet that childcare in the UK is worse than Germany. Any British people care to comment on that?

Well, in Ireland, there are a lot of Catholics who actually believe in and practice what the catholic church says - ie. no birth control.

Maybe I'm wrong, just a guess.

I'll no doubt get shot down in flames for this, but Ireland is hardly a haven of women's rights.
Birth control, abortion, even divorce are all contentious if not illegal.
Catholicism - don't get me started...

presumably you also won't know for sure if 'your way' is better either will you?