Why women’s working hours in Germany are still hindering the country’s growth – Technologist

Anne Wendel chose to reduce her working hours to 26 hours a week, out of necessity. The young woman, who preferred not to give her real name, is the mother of two children under the age of 10. Born in 1985 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, East Germany, she has always taken female employment for granted. But in the conservative rural region of Oldenburg (Lower Saxony) where she moved two years ago to follow her husband, she discovered that school and nursery opening hours were extremely limited: 8 am to 1 pm, 3 pm at the latest. With a degree in child pedagogy, she aspired to take up a management position in a nursery school, but had to give up on this goal. “They only accepted full-time applications. With the constraints of the schools here, it just wasn’t feasible.”

For the past two years, she has also had to deal with the absence of teaching staff, which has discouraged her from increasing her working hours. “The first year, it often happened that the nursery announced in the morning that they couldn’t take my son, because the teachers were not there.” At her daughter’s school, it’s barely any better. “Every morning, she doesn’t know if what’s on her timetable will be respected, too many teachers are absent. Classes are grouped together and teachers have to improvise all the time. It’s a major stress for her.”

Anne looks back with nostalgia on her former life in Dresden (East), where nurseries reliably looked after her children until 5 pm or 6 pm, with great flexibility. “This enabled me to organize my life, whatever my schedule. Here in the region, many women decide to stay at home for three years. I often wonder how single mothers do it, or those whose jobs involve late afternoon attendance. And whether women can really make their life goals come true.”

Economic lethargy

Anne’s situation is no exception in Germany. It may be true that many nurseries, kindergartens and schools, once open only in the morning, have extended their opening hours over the last 30 years, enabling more and more women to participate in the labor market. As a result, the employment rate for women aged between 15 and 64 has risen sharply, from 57% in 1991 to 73.6% in 2023, a very high rate by international comparison. But there is a significant downside: 50% of working women work part-time, compared with 13% of men, one of the highest gaps among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.

For parents of children under 18, the gulf between men and women is even greater: 67% of mothers work part-time, compared with just 9% of fathers, noted the German statistics institute Destatis for the year 2023. The wage gap between men and women is 17.7%, well above the European average (12.7%).

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