On 13 June while Germany’s Families Minister Manuela Schwesig (SPD) continues her battle within the coalition government to get her draft law on equal pay passed, the employer friendly IW (Cologne Institute for Economic Research) institute presented a study demonstrating that such a law would be useless. For IW, gender wage gaps are narrower than those put forward by the Minister and result from personal employee choices over which the State has no influence. At the same time another law, also much decried by employers, is starting to yield results. According to the Berlin based German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), the proportion of females on the supervisory boards of DAX 30 quoted companies has sharply increased since January 01 2016 when the law on female quotas on the supervisory boards of Germany’s biggest businesses was implemented.
‘Personal choices’. According to Eurostat, the European Statistics Office, at 21.6% in 2014, Germany almost topped the list of EU countries with high gender wage gaps in favor of males. Just three countries pay women even less: the Czech Republic, Austria, and Estonia. However the IW institute argues that this data is of little significance because it doesn’t take factors into account that influence wages, especially the sector of activity, the size of the company, the amount of professional e
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