Katharina Wrohlich, head of the Gender Economics research group at the German Institute for Economic Studies (DIW) in Berlin, points out that considerable progress has been made in childcare over the past twenty years.
Is the current labour shortage along the Rhine an opportunity to remove barriers to women’s employment in Germany, particularly those that weigh on mothers?
This is certainly an essential issue, but I am not very optimistic about a rapid improvement. The lack of childcare facilities for young children is not a political problem: most parties and economic federations have understood the importance of further developing them in order to encourage women to work. The problem lies in the difficulties of their practical implementation. It should be remembered that in the last twenty years, enormous progress has been made in the West: in the mid-2000s, only 3% to 5% of children under 3 years of age were in childcare. Now it is about one in three children. This policy of developing childcare facilities was, so to speak, a victim of its success: the demand for childcare facilities grew faster than the development of the supply of childcare facilities. And we reached certain limits. The biggest obstacle today to increasing the working hours of mothers is the shortage of qualified educators.
Should we reform mini-jobs, short-term contracts exempt from social security contributions, which are often held by women?
In fact, mini-jobs are an area that could easily be addressed. They were launched in a context of mass unemployment, in 2005. There is no reason for the state to continue massively subsidising these short-time jobs, while the country is in a situation of labour shortage. This is all the more absurd since research has shown that these jobs could be career dead ends for those who occupy them. It is easier to get out of unemployment than to move from a mini-job to a regular job. But the resistance of certain sectors, such as hotels and restaurants, means that the elimination of these contracts is not on the agenda. As for family taxation, which is disadvantageous for married women, the government recently announced a reform to be implemented in 2030. It goes in the right direction, but will have limited effects.
Statistics show that in Germany, women who have reduced their working hours to care for their children rarely return to full-time work once their children are older. Why?
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