Studying still gives women fewer opportunities than men.
Photo: dpa / dpaweb | Oliver Berg
“So that women don’t pay the price of the crisis, we need an equality check for the Corona policy,” demands Susanne Feldkötter. She is chairwoman of the district women’s committee in the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) Berlin-Brandenburg. It is mostly women who stayed at home and looked after children when the daycare center and school were closed, explains Vice District Chairman Sonja Staack. A survey by the union-affiliated Hans Böckler Foundation shows that in autumn 2020 women worked an average of six hours less work per week than men – before the pandemic the difference was five hours. “This widens the gap between the working hours of women and men in the crisis,” says Staack.
The inequality between the sexes has also been documented for eleven years by the gender data report based on data from the Berlin-Brandenburg Statistics Office from the House of Gender Equality Senator Dilek Kalyci (SPD). The so-called gender pay gap is serious: in the 35 to 55 age group, 68.5 percent of men, but only 58 percent of women, earn more than 1,500 euros net. This is also evident from the recently presented edition with the figures for 2019. On average, women earn around a fifth less than men in professions subject to social insurance. One reason for this is the higher part-time work among women.
»We want the working hours and the care times of men and women to be the same. In the crisis, this development goes in the wrong direction, «says DGB woman Staack. In the companies, it must be ensured that women in particular can increase their working hours again after the crisis, and dismissals due to downtime during the crisis are excluded.
In general, the proportion of employed women is high in Berlin at almost 72 percent, emphasizes Lena Högemann, spokeswoman for the equal opportunities administration. That is a good thing: “Increasing labor force participation also leads to rising incomes for women.” However, things are progressing very slowly here.
The report also shows that the educational lead of younger generations of women is not reflected in the career and salary ladder. Across the generations, more women than men have a higher education entrance qualification (57 to 53 percent), among 25 to 34-year-olds it is even 74 percent (men: 69 percent). But there are almost 1000 female professors at Berlin’s state universities, as opposed to over 2000 professors. The differences are also great elsewhere: women make up more than half of the 23,667 medical professionals – but only 34 percent of senior physicians. In management positions, the proportion of women is less than a fifth.
The gender data report also covers other dimensions of inequality. According to this, around 66 percent of Berliners with a migration background have a job, but almost 80 percent of those without.
Women have one advantage in terms of average life expectancy – it is almost five years higher than that of men. One of the reasons for this is that women take fewer health risks. You smoke less, are less overweight and have more preventive medical checkups. This is particularly noticeable in cancer screening: more than half of women do health checks, but only a quarter of men.
Gender-based violence is the main threat to women’s health. Of the 15,665 victims of intimate partner or family violence in 2018, 72 percent were women. They even make up 80 percent of those seeking help because of stalking.
The report is also dedicated to political participation. The fact that the quota of women in the House of Representatives is far too low is primarily due to the “male-dominated parties”. Of the 25 AfD mandates at the beginning of the legislature, only three were women, while the FDP had two out of twelve. In contrast, the Greens had 59 percent women, the left-wing faction 48 percent. It fits into the picture that the AfD was elected much more often by men than by women (18 to 11 percent).
Senator Kalayci writes in the foreword that progress in equality is not progressing in a straight line Members. ”There was still a lot to do before gender parity.
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