The less equal among equals

Margret Jonik, a tall redhead with a nagging smoker's cough, has been pushing cargo around a warehouse floor in steel-toed shoes for 21 years.

Jonik has given her aching back and more than a third of her life to Suederelbe Logistik on the Hamburg harbour front. So she was furious last year, she said, when she discovered that her male colleagues were being paid higher wages for exactly the same work.

In the past, her anger might have come to nothing in a German business world dominated by men.

But by using a recently enacted anti-discrimination law, Jonik and dozens of female co-workers were able to proceed legally against the company, which settled out of court and agreed to raise the women's pay.

“I am very happy, not just for myself but also for other women in Germany,'' said Jonik, 57, a quiet pioneer in a workplace battle that women are waging in many of the world's wealthiest nations, including the United States.

The global struggle for women's equality often focuses on the developing world, where women still lack some of the most basic of rights, including education and protection from rape.

But in many affluent countries, women's rights advocates say, gender bias endures. It is just harder to see.

German law requires that men and women be treated equally; labour contracts that once specified that women be paid 80 per cent of the male rate are long gone.

The government is headed by a woman, Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Yet many Germans, male and female, continue to hold to the traditional German notion that a woman's focus should be kinder, kueche, kirche — children, kitchen, church.

Women who do work often find stubborn barriers. German government statistics show that men typically earn 24 per cent more per hour than women, among the widest gender pay gaps in Europe.

Women rarely hold top posts in German business. There is only one woman among the 200 people who sit on the executive boards of the top 30 companies on the German DAX stock index, according to Christian Rickens, editor of Manager magazine.

“One is a pretty frightening number,'' Rickens said. “You can't say this is just because women choose to stay home with their children; one third of women with university degrees don't have children.''

“No company will tell you that you won't get promoted because you are a woman,'' Rickens said.

But the people who run companies are men, he said, and they “like to surround themselves with people they trust, who think like they do — people like themselves''.

In dozens of interviews with German men and women, nearly all agreed that many employers were reluctant to hire and promote women of childbearing age.

Ralf Braun, 40, an internet marketer, said it is only natural for a boss to think that a woman “at some point will get pregnant and stop working'', causing problems for the workplace.

He predicted that there would never be complete gender equality at work: “Even in 50 years, I don't think it will be equal.''

Many men said they believed children and families benefited when women stayed at home. Merkel's government has made a priority of trying to improve conditions for working mothers, including a new effort to encourage fathers to take paternity leave.

In eastern Germany, which was a communist state till 1990, women were encouraged to work and an extensive childcare network helped them.

Today, in the united country, working parents complain that childcare centres are scarce in the west.

The derogatory words “raven mother'' are heard mostly in western Germany. The term means one who abandons her young in the nest to pursue a career.

“People say this about you behind your back,'' said Miriam Holzapfel, 33, a university graduate and mother of two in Hamburg who lost her job after she had a baby. “My friends in the east don't have such social pressure.''

Jonik said the settlement money has made a huge difference. Now, she said, she is enjoying the comfort “of being able to save a little each month for retirement''.

As she headed back into the warehouse on her bicycle for a late shift that would end at 10pm, she said the “waters have smoothed'' at work since the lawsuit. Many of her male co-workers are happy for the women, although none would agree to be interviewed.

But Jonik said a few scars from her little skirmish in the gender wars remain.

“Every once in a while, when there is a heavy box, before, a man would have said, ‘I'll get it.' Now he might say, ‘You get it.'''

“Men,'' she said, shaking her head.