Women in politics
“I’m surprised the Merkel government has achieved so little change for women in politics over 16 years”

Germany has been governed by a woman for four parliamentary terms: Chancellor Angela Merkel is also the first woman to hold this senior political office. Yet her chancellorship has not smoothed the way towards a higher ratio of women in politics, as political scientist Barbara Holland-Cunz points out. In this interview she explains how quotas can help, how long it will be before women are represented equally in politics – and why one reason Germany looks so bad is that others are doing better.

By Martina Vetter

Ms Holland-Cunz, women are still considerably underrepresented in politics, you only have to look at the statistics. Until 1983 the proportion of women in the German Bundestag stood at less than 10 per cent. Since then it’s true that the figure has risen substantially – however the balance looked miserable after the last Bundestag election in 2017. The number of female members of parliament dropped from 37 per cent (the highest so far) to a mere 31 per cent. What was the cause of that?
 
Genuine changes need a lot of time. It’s difficult to balance 3,000 years of patriarchy against 16 years of Angela Merkel. And just because Merkel is a woman doesn’t make it easier for all women to find acceptance in politics. With regard to the ratio of women in politics we’ve been experiencing a sort of stagnation on a national scale since 2002 and we’ve become stuck at the same awful point. Yet, at a global level in fact we’ve fallen far behind: according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which counts the percentage of women in the upper and lower houses of parliament worldwide, the German Bundestag occupied 15th place in the lower house rankings at the end of 2005. Today we only rank 54th in the world. Other countries have left us standing thanks to parity laws and party quotas. It’s actually possible to get worse due to others being better.
 
Would it be a good idea to have a women’s quota to change that? 
 
I was always sceptical of the idea that everything would change if we introduced a quota. On the other hand I don’t see any alternative but to take an institutional approach to this issue. Without a quota for women we are unlikely to achieve much by way of gender equality. Still, a lot has been done in terms of family policy under Chancellor Merkel – especially while Ursula von der Leyen was Minister of Family Affairs. We now have parental allowance, maternity and paternity leave, guaranteed childcare and so on. And it’s quite a big deal if women are able to combine family and career.
 
Nevertheless women usually do the lion’s share where childcare and domestic chores are concerned.
 
Of course that’s true, and the corona pandemic in particular has resulted in a dramatic step backwards. Suddenly the mums were cooped up at home again. Equal pay has not progressed in recent years either. Personally I have underestimated the stability of our gender relations – I wouldn’t have thought that women’s politics would have changed so little in the 16 years Merkel has been in power. But maybe that’s too short-sighted. I’ve been active in feminist politics for 40 years, but what I’ve achieved is not in proportion to my political commitment. 
 
Do you think it’s justifiable for chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock, as a mother of two young children, to be asked how she intends to balance family with her political office?
 
I think the question is certainly legitimate, but men should be asked exactly the same thing. After all it’s clear that this position of responsibility demands a lot of an individual. However, I think it would be relevant to democratic policy to ask the question: Can’t we organise public service roles differently? It must be possible to perform them without working an 80-hour week – that’s not a people-friendly model for organising politics because it does mean that either the children have to be grown-up already, or politicians need to be childless like Angela Merkel or Olaf Scholz.

After the initial hype, Baerbock had to deal with a lot of criticism. Was that justified?
 
Anyone who sugar-coats their résumé and lifts passages in their book from the work of other authors can expect to endure public criticism. Behaviour like this doesn’t give a professional impression. 
 
There were also accusations of plagiarism against Armin Laschet. But unlike Baerbock he didn’t have to endure such a commotion in the digital media. Does that have anything to do with Baerbock being a woman?
 
In principle it’s true to say that politically active women are far more exposed to hate attacks in a digital environment than men are (see box). But unlike male politicians they are rarely subjected to attacks because of their political stance, it’s more likely to be sexualised hate speech with violent fantasies. Defamatory attacks like this are also responsible for keeping women away from politics. They anticipate how powerfully and aggressively people are attacked in the online world. They need to cut themselves off from it, which isn’t so easy.
 
None of this sounds as if we can expect an equal balance of men and women any time soon, does it? 
 
Various studies have been carried out relating to this question. If they are right, it could take between 100 and almost 500 years before we have gender equality.