The wage gap between men and women can be put down to the fact that mothers often choose flexibility over career progression,…….. says Sarah Plass.

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Mamma Mia: Most working mothers find it difficult to balance children and career.

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Maria Schaad, an ambitious 41-year-old businesswoman, considers herself lucky. After the birth of each of her sons, now seven and three, her employer, a major pharmaceutical company, allowed her to work flexible, reduced hours — a perk that is far from a given in Germany.

But her luck extended only so far. Although Schaad had once set her sights on a position in management, her career stagnated after she started a family, even though she had earned an MBA after she became a mother.

“At some point, women have to make a decision,” she said matter-of-factly. “Having children means you have to make compromises” at work.

Millions of working mothers — and sometimes fathers — have to make often difficult trade-offs when it comes to work and family, but labour experts say the calculus is especially harsh in Germany, a country that despite having a female head of state and sitting at the centre of supposedly liberal Europe, has one of the widest gender wage gaps on the Continent.

It is just one of the disparities between working men and women, especially mothers, that government and union leaders say is creating a drag on female participation in the work force and, consequently, on economic growth, at a time when Germany may be teetering on the edge of recession. And they point to a range of societal and governmental barriers that are hindering change.

Ingrid Sehrbrock, deputy chairwoman of the German Federation of Trade Unions, calls German pay inequity a “scandal”. Europe’s commissioner for employment and social affairs, Vladimir Spidla, recently called on German employers “to really apply the principle of equal pay for equal work”.

A clutch of new data suggests that Germany is going in the opposite direction. While the wage gap between women and men is narrowing across the European Union and in the US, it is stagnant in Germany.

Since 2000, German working women on an average have gone from earning 26 per cent less than men to making 24 per cent less than men in 2006, the last year for which statistics are available, according to data provided by the government statistics bureau, Destatis.

It is one of the largest gender gaps in the European Union. Only Cyprus, Estonia and Slovakia have equal or greater gaps, according to a study by the European statistics service, Eurostat.

Across the Continent, women on an average made 15.9 per cent less than men in 2007. That gap has narrowed each year since 2001, when women made 20.4 per cent less than men, according to a report released recently by the EU foundation that has studied the trend for years.

Comparing statistics with those of the US can be difficult, since Europeans tend to count part-time and full-time workers, while the US statistics mostly count full-time workers. Women are more likely to work part-time, which depresses their average wage and increases the gender gap when both full and part-time workers are considered.

There are many reasons why Germany has continually been in the European cellar. Outright gender discrimination is one, researchers say. Maternity leave is another: men get promoted while their female colleagues take time off to have children.

“The dilemma is that while 50 per cent of the junior employees are female, they pretty much disappear on their way to middle management,” said Heiner Thorborg, a human resources consultant in Frankfurt and a vocal critic of gender inequality. The income gap is smaller for younger women who have not had children. It is greatest in western Germany, largely because the average hourly wage for men in this part of the country is almost 50 per cent more than for men in the former East Germany. Some human resources experts even point to less aggressive salary negotiations by women. (Coaching programmes aimed at women have mushroomed over the last decade.)

But there are also societal and policy pressures. For example, mothers who work are sometimes derided as Rabenmutter, or “raven mothers”. The phrase — based on the erroneous belief that ravens fly away, leaving their nests behind — refers to women who pursue careers instead of being homemakers. It is more common in the west than in the east of the country.

On the policy front, Germany has some of Europe’s least generous supports for working parents. Just nine per cent of children aged three or younger have access to daycare, compared with an average of 23 per cent in advanced countries. In northern European nations, the numbers are even higher: 40 to 60 per cent.

Eastern Germany still benefits from a wider network of childcare operations — a legacy of the communist era, when female participation in the work force was among the highest in the world and daycare was vital.

The minister for family affairs, Ursula von der Leyen, recently introduced a plan to help finance private childcare and increase the availability of kindergarten spots. The German Parliament is expected to approve it by the end of the year.

Officials in Berlin have also tried to make having children more attractive. In 2007, the government introduced Elterngeld, or parents’ money, a benefit intended to encourage fathers and mothers to take time off after the birth of a child. Almost 20 per cent of new fathers have applied for the benefit so far this year.

Meanwhile, some 60 per cent of married couples with children younger than three follow the same pattern: fathers keep working full-time, while mothers stay at home.

The difficulty for many women in working and rearing children is partly responsible for Germany having one of Europe’s lowest fertility rates: 1.37 children per woman, researchers say. It does not help that women in child-bearing years are still often asked in job interviews if they plan to have children — a question that is against the law.

Silke Strauss said she could not have attained her present position had she decided to have children. She was just named managing partner of a management consulting firm, and is the only female partner among eight men. “It would simply not work with children, not with the amount of flexibility that is expected,” said Strauss, 42.

For some women, time spent abroad makes a critical difference, showing them that life can be different.

Jutta Allmendinger, the first female president of the Social Science Research Center in Berlin and the mother of a 14-year-old son, earned a PhD at Harvard. While there, Allmendinger said, she saw the “idols of her youth” — female colleagues who taught while being pregnant and went back to work soon after giving birth, while still nursing their children.

Back in Germany in 1993, she became pregnant while teaching sociology in Munich. Some of her colleagues, unable to imagine she would consider having a baby, thought she had just overeaten during the summer. “It was impossible for some people that women in certain positions would actually have children,” said Allmendinger, 51, laughing.

Sources: NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE