Anne Wendel finally decided to reduce her working hours to twenty-six hours a week, out of necessity. The young woman, who prefers not to give her real name, is the mother of two children under the age of 10. Born in East Germany in 1985, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, she always considered women’s work to be a given. But in the rural and conservative region of Oldenburg (Lower Saxony), where she moved two years ago to follow her husband, she discovered that schools and daycare centers had extremely limited opening hours: from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., and 3 p.m. at the latest. With a degree in child education, she aspired to take on a position of responsibility in a nursery school, but she had to give up: “They were only accepting full-time applications. With the constraints of the schools here, it wasn’t feasible.”
For the past two years, she has also had to deal with the problems of absent teaching staff, which have definitely discouraged her from increasing her working hours. “The first year, it often happened that the nursery announced in the morning that they could not take my son, because there were not enough teachers.” At his daughter’s school, it’s hardly better. “Every morning, she doesn’t know if what’s on her schedule will be respected, too many teachers are absent. Classes are grouped together, teachers have to improvise constantly. It’s a major stress for her.”
Anne looks back with nostalgia on her former life in Dresden (East), where daycare centres reliably looked after her children until 5 or 6 p.m., with great flexibility. “It allowed me to organize myself, no matter what my schedule was. Here in the region, many women decide to stay at home for three years. I often wonder how single mothers do it, or those whose jobs involve being there late in the afternoon. And if women can really make their life wishes come true.”
Economic lethargy
Anne’s situation is not an exception in Germany. Of course, many daycare centers, kindergartens and schools, which used to be open only in the morning, have extended their opening hours over the last thirty years, allowing more and more women to participate in the labor market. The employment rate of women between the ages of 15 and 64 has thus increased significantly, from 57% in 1991 to 73.6% in 2023, a rate that is very high by international standards. But the downside is significant: 50% of working women work part-time, compared to 13% of men, one of the highest gaps in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
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