Career Opportunities for Women and the Wage Gap: Is the "glass ceiling" Still a Reality or Already History?

Recent studies show that compensation differences between men and women are growing. Friederike Maier, Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Recht Berlin, highlights that, according to the Federal Statistics Office, a large wage gap still exists between working men and women. This gap amounted to 22% on German national average in 2012, with a difference of 24% in Western Germany and 7% in Eastern Germany. In her opinion, discrimination against women continues in the labour market, not directly in the form of salary deductions as in the 1970s, but indirectly via the segregation of employment and institutionalized inequalities in career paths. For woman are mainly employed in jobs and branches with low wages and far fewer women are employed in highly-paid positions than men. For Oliver Stettes, Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, Cologne, the average wage gap of 22% is no indication of unfair treatment. For this figure does not say that men and women are paid unequally for the same position, with the same level of qualification and responsibility, in the same company and the same job experience and with the same number of years of service, but is only an average statistic. However, women and men still, even in 2013, follow fundamentally different career paths. They choose different jobs - women on average tend more often to choose positions in which the chances of earning money are poorer than elsewhere for both sexes - and tend to opt for different career paths. Moreover, it is still mostly women who interrupt their professional careers for a longer period of time to have children or decide to work part-time. If one considers all of the factors that are usually related to compensation levels, there is not much left of the wage gap, since the choice of profession and post are left up to the individual. According to Monika Queisser, OECD, although the differences in compensation between men and women tend to fall from one generation to the next, meaning that younger women now earn almost as much as young men in many countries, large gaps between men and women can still be found in nearly all OECD countries. More specifically, the major difference in the wages earned lies not between men and women, but between men and mothers. Policy approaches could be used to tackle this issue. Child care is an important factor that can enable women to resume full-time employment after taking time out to have a baby or care for children, and to return to positions for which they are trained and in which they are well-paid.