The 8th of March is International Women’s Day, an event started in 1911 when Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland celebrated it for the first time.
The idea was inspired earlier by movements in the United States and Germany. In 1910, Clara Zetkin, a communist activist and women’s rights advocate in Germany, presented the idea at an International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen. The idea gained backing from 100 women from 17 countries, who were at the conference. The following year, the event came into being in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. In 1975, The United Nations decided to start marking the event.
While Switzerland was one of the first countries to mark the day, it still ranks far behind a number of later entrants on offering some of the ingredients that help women to have successful careers. Overall, the Economist’s glass-ceiling index ranks Switzerland fourth from the bottom in a ranking of OECD nations.
While the country scores close to or above average on seven of the ten measures that make up the final score, it compares poorly on the other three, which include net child care costs, paid work leave for mothers, and somewhat puzzlingly, the higher education gap – tertiary education is largely free and open to all in Switzerland. One explanation might be that it reflects past education discrimination.
Switzerland’s highly priced and often scarce childcare is a shock to many who arrive in Switzerland from other OECD nations. And school timetables that send children home at lunchtimes add further to the challenges faced by working parents, mothers in particular.
One analysis finds childcare challenges to be the most significant driver of career inequality. It finds that nearly all of the earnings gap between men and women is between women who have children and women who don’t. In the US, average pay for women is 81% of that for men. However, average pay for women who don’t have children is 96% of that for men – see short Netflix documentary on the subject here.
Increasing paid leave for new parents is a perennial point of political friction in Switzerland. The compromise often suggested is to create a larger pool of paid parental leave that can be shared flexibly between parents. This would help all parents without penalising those who choose to structure their lives around one person working and one staying at home full time. But there is resistance to this idea from the left, which favours separate pools of paid maternity and paternity leave, something the other side sees as politically biased in favour of a family model where both parents work at the expense of those who choose a more traditional family model.
Changing beliefs around gender roles seems to be the key to shifting the balance. As long as women are expected to be primary childcarers, it is likely those who choose to have children will be penalised. And as long as men are expected to be primary economic providers (and soldiers under Switzerland’s male conscription system), change is likely to run into a degree of resentment and resistance.
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