Hot campaign issue in Germany: working moms

Maria-Louisa di Biagio still remembers the sting of disapproval from her German friends when she returned to work after the birth of her son.

"I felt like a terrible mom who gave up her children to strangers," says Ms. di Biagio, now a mother of two and executive assistant to the director of the European Central Bank.

For generations, Germany has largely taken it for granted that a mother's place is in the home. But the hausfrau model of marriage isn't yielding the expected results. Germany's birthrate has dropped ominously since the 1970s and is now among the lowest in the industrialized world, threatening the labor pool and the economy.

The picture is now so dire that two months from the national elections, promoting parenthood is a dominant campaign theme. Politicians of all stripes are offering better access to child care, monetary incentives, and other rewards, and they are voicing more openness toward various models of family.

Within Europe, Germany joins Spain and Italy, where fertility rates are the lowest in the world (1.2 per woman), in trying to encourage more children.

Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government has launched a raft of measures to help young families and thus encourage the birth of more babies, such as opening more nurseries and subsidizing couples buying their first home. In a measure also aimed at getting more Spanish women into the workforce to reduce reliance on immigrants, the Spanish government is reforming its tax law to give working mothers with children under the age of 3 a tax rebate of $1,130 per child.

The European Union overall has a fertility rate of 1.5, well below the 2.14 needed to keep a population stable.

While the German government already pays one of Europe's most generous monthly cash allowances to every family – the equivalent of $150 per child – it lags far behind France, for example, in offering tax and other family incentives. In contrast to many other European countries, Germany has never developed a child care infrastructure or all-day schools. Mothers, it was thought, should be at home to cook lunch for their children.

Politicians are promising to open day-care centers, create all-day schools, and institute tax advantages for parents, whether they are married or not.

"In Germany, it is society that looks down on you if you don't stay at home, and therefore society doesn't delegate much," says Ms. di Biagio.

These attitudes explain why, in Germany, women often choose between career or family rather than juggle both, economists and social science experts say.

According to Juergen Dorbritz, a researcher on family issues with the German Institute for Population Studies in Wiesbaden, one-third of young German women remain unmarried and childless today compared with a fifth a decade ago.

As a senior vice president at Commerzbank in Frankfurt, Petra Eberlein-Kemper feels like a loner. She's the only manager at her level who is also a mother and says she longs for role models, women with whom she could discuss the "complexity of the entire situation." Three percent of the bank's top managers, below the board of directors, are women. None has children. Mrs. Eberlein-Kemper manages to work full time because her husband is self-employed and can pick up their two toddlers.

Although half the university graduates in Germany are women, they hold only a little over 6 percent of the most prestigious full professorships – far below European standards – according to a study of women in top positions in Germany by the international consulting firm Accenture. Twenty-seven percent of German working women hold managerial positions – which gives Germany, along with Switzerland, the lowest share in Europe, according to figures cited by Accenture.

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