In Germany, retired women are the great sacrificed

At 81, Bavarian Helma Sick is still working. “More than ever,” she says. Financial advisor, she founded in 1987 Frau & Geld (woman and money), a consulting company that helps mothers in need when it comes time to retire. In more than thirty years, she received several thousand clients, most of whom, she explains from her practice in Munich, “in a desperate material situation. The pattern is immutable. Once they become mothers, the German women tend to give up their professional lives, however qualified they may be, and only return to work much later.” Because the social pressure remains strong. For the expert, the Nazi ideology of the “3K” (Kinder, Küche, Kirche, children, kitchen, church) still permeates the collective unconscious. And even if under the Merkel era, there was progress, in particular with the proliferation of nurseries and schools open all day, instead of mornings only, the very derogatory expressions of “Raben-Mutter” (mother crow) or “Karriere-Frau” (career woman) are far from belonging to the past.

As a result, the average pension, which is 1,200 euros for men, plummets to 728 euros for women. West German baby-boomers are particularly badly off. “They were pushed to stay at home, details Helma Sick. After the children, they took care of the elderly parents, did a little volunteering, sometimes resumed an activity, but in general on a part-time basis.” In the years of the economic miracle, Chancellor Adenauer did indeed cease to repeat that prosperity rhymed with a stay-at-home mother. We weren’t going to look like the women of the GDR, who “were forced to go to the factory”, she adds.

A look back at graduates

On the other hand, in the East the women worked, stopping only temporarily (the time of a “BabyJahr”, a year for the baby), before resuming active life. This explains why their pension amounts to an average of 1,000 euros today.

What saddens Helma Sick is that even in the younger generation, women continue to stop working as soon as the second, or even the first child arrives. “There is a kind of backtracking, especially among graduates that I cannot explain to myself.” In 2017, researchers Michaela Kreyenfeld and Dirk Konietzka published an article entitled “A child or a job, the dilemmas of German women”, in which they underlined how parental leave for fathers is difficult to enter into mores. They noted: “Dad months” drew criticism and were regularly derided by the media, who saw them as courses to learn how to change diapers (Wickel-Volunteering). Conservative politicians, on the other hand, saw it as an illegitimate intrusion into the private sphere.”

A masculine and formatted political world

As a result of this pressure in a country which for sixteen years was ruled by a chancellor without children, Germany has one of the lowest birth rates in the world with 1.5 children per woman. Incidentally, Chancellor Scholz and his wife Britta Ernst have no children either. In 2018, the statistics office established that one in five women across the Rhine is childless. Among female graduates, it was one in four, with peaks in the major cities of West Germany: 27% in Berlin and even 31% in Hamburg.

“The forces opposing the work of mothers remain strong, enrages Helma Sick, especially in the political world which remains very masculine and very formatted. Mentalities are struggling to evolve.” As proof, she points out, we have two green ministers in government. Robert Habeck, Minister of Economy and Energy, father of four children, and Annalena Baerbock, Minister of Foreign Affairs and mother of two daughters. “Guess who we ask how we reconcile work and private life? Who constantly has to justify himself. Baerbock of course.”