An the surface, it looks as if women are making very slow progress in the German working world. As before, only every seventh German board seat in Germany’s large corporations is owned by a woman, as the auditing firm EY counted last week.
But there is more going on beneath the surface than many people think. The FAS has figures on how many women are promoted to managerial positions in Germany. Across the country, and not just on the big boards, but deep down in the factories.
This shows that women are being promoted more and more often, men less and less. Looking only at full-time workers, men and women are practically equal: for both genders, managers make up around 7 percent of full-time workers, at least according to the latest data from 2020. The numbers still differ in decimal places, but this difference is no longer statistically significant.
The information comes from the socio-economic panel, a long-term study for which around 30,000 people in Germany are asked about their living conditions every year. Researchers know whether someone is working or not, whether they are in a managerial position or not – and also whether all of this is full-time or part-time.
Same opportunities full-time
“Our data shows that women who work full-time have roughly the same chances of getting a managerial position as men who work full-time,” says sociologist Katja Schmidt. It is a powerful insight. “This is very good news,” says Wiebke Ankersen, managing director of the Allbright Foundation, which advocates more diversity in management positions.
So far, gender researchers have assumed that unconscious prejudices work against women and ensure that even equally qualified women are promoted less often and are judged worse in management positions, even by their employees. This is still the case in many companies today. Because the new data only represent an average.
“The situation differs greatly from company to company. We have clients who only want to hire women – but also those who unfortunately say: I can’t imagine that a woman can do the job,” says Eva Tholen, who is looking for candidates for positions in top management at the Egon Zehnder personnel consultancy. So there are still companies in which all the unconscious prejudices against women in managerial positions are breaking out.
But there are now also a few companies in which all the equality programs of the past few years are having an effect and in which women are more likely to be promoted than men, at least if they work full-time. This is the only way to achieve the overall equality that the socio-economic panel depicts.
One of these establishments is the European Central Bank (ECB). Some time ago she systematically examined her promotion practice. The result was that the ECB now promotes so many women that both genders are now represented in management positions in proportion to the number of people in the workforce. However, this was only possible at the price that women had twice as much chance of success as men in the selection process.
