Andrey Popov via NDLA/scanpix.com
Gender-Blind, Not Gender-Neutral
Joyce Mushaben
University of Missouri - St. Louis
Joyce Marie Mushaben is a Curators’ Professor of Comparative Politics and former Director of the Institute for Women's & Gender Studies (2002-2005). Fluent in German, her teaching centers on comparative public policy, the European Union, women's leadership, citizenship, immigration, mega-cities and sustainability issues. Her research covers new social movements, youth protest, German unification and identities, gender, ethnicity and welfare issues, EU migration and integration studies.
Her books/monographs include Identity without a Hinterland? Continuity and Change in National Consciousness in the German Democratic Republic, 1949-1989 (1993); From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Attitudes towards the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany (1998); The Changing Faces of Citizenship: Integration and Mobilization among Ethnic Minorities in Germany (2008); and, Gendering the European Union: New Responses to Old Democratic Deficits (co-edited with Gabriele Abels, 2012). Her latest book focuses on Becoming Madam Chancellor: Angela Merkel and the Berlin Republic (2016). Her articles have appeared in World Politics, Polity, West European Politics, German Politics, German Politics & Society, the Journal of Peace Research, Democratization, Politics & Religion, Citizenship Studies, Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, German Law Review and Femina Politica. A past president of the German Studies Association (USA), she has also served on the Executive Boards of the International Association for the Study of German Politics and the German Studies Association, as well as on selection committees for Fulbright, the German Academic Exchange Service and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is a current Editorial Board member for German Politics & Society, German Politics, and Femina Politica.
Having received a 1999 Trailblazer Award and the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Research Creativity in 2007, Mushaben is a three-time Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, a former Ford Foundation Fellow, German Marshall Fund grantee and DAAD recipient. She has held guest-scholar posts at the Academy for Social Sciences (GDR), the Center for Youth Research (GDR), the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Research (Berlin). She was named the first Research Associate in the BMW Center for German & European Studies at Georgetown University, has enjoyed Visiting Professorships at the Ohio State University, Berlin’s Humboldt University, the Missouri-London Program and at the Universities of Erfurt, Stuttgart and Tübingen (Germany) , inter alia. Affiliated with the American Institute for Contemporary German Politics (Washington D.C.) and a designated Fulbright Specialist, she is commonly known as "Dr. J."
Friedrich Merz and Pension Reform
Hoping, for the third time, to become CDU party chair, Friedrich Merz declared in January 2021: “I know that we have to be better and do more regarding women’s politics. But if I really had a woman problem, as some say, then my daughters would have shown me the yellow card long ago, and my wife would not have married me forty years ago.”
Addressing Germany’s annual stock-brokers’ reception as chancellor in 2026, Merz proposed a comprehensive pension reform that would “re-weight” the three pillars comprising the federal system since 2002. Guaranteed state pensions (Grundsatzrente) would remain one building block, albeit with greater stress on occupational pensions (Betriebsrente) and private investments .
This proposal followed his gender-specific reform, adopted in June 2025, involving a modest increase in so-called Mother’s Pensions. Instead of 2.5 “points” per child previously calculated into their tax-financed basic pensions, all 9.8 million women who gave birth prior to 1992 would achieve parity with younger mothers, accorded three points per child. The average increase of €107 per month would purportedly extend “long overdue recognition of decades of unpaid care work provided by generations of mothers.” Merz possesses a very limited understanding of “gender equality,” disregarding major pension disparities between the sexes.
Exhibit A: The Pay Gap
Two factors routinely contribute to pension inequality and female poverty in old age: the gender employment gap and pay discrimination. The Merkel years saw a dramatic increase in female employment following the adoption of “care” guarantees for all children over age one, rising from 58 percent in 2004 to almost 73 percent by 2019. Regional differences persist: the job gap is larger between western women (58 percent) and men (66.2 percent) than between their eastern female (61.8 percent) and male (63.9 percent) counterparts. But 49.8 percent of women work part-time, in contrast to 13 percent among men.
Among full-time workers, Germany’s gender pay gap of 16-18 percent exceeds the EU average (12 percent). Its women are twice as likely (37 percent) to hold low-paid jobs than men (18 percent). In fact, 2.4 million fewer women work in domains subject to social insurance, leaving them without occupational pensions. In 2024, the median gross salary of women in full-time jobs covered by social insurance was €3,793 per month, compared to €4,138 for men. One main cause is the national care gap.
Exhibit B: The Gender Care Gap
German fertility rates (1.35) have reached a new low, following a temporary boomlet during Merkel’s fourth term, ascribed to new child-care guarantees and paternal leaves. Politicians exhort women to produce more babies to mitigate looming labor shortages, but parental demands for care-places significantly exceed the supply, especially in the west. In 2023-2024, the Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft (German Economic Institute) registered a shortfall of 306,00 nursery-places for toddlers under three, while the Bertelsmann Foundation reported a lack of 430,000 Kita-slots for all pre-school ages.
A dearth of child- and elder-care options fuels women’s dependence on part-time work, as does marital tax splitting, adopted by the old Federal Republic in 1958. The latter sought to keep married women out of the paid labor force, with or without children; benefiting high-earning men, it restricts (mostly) western women to “mini-jobs” with mini-earnings. Efforts to scrap that system were rejected in 2023.
Federal statistics show that 86 percent of Germany’s 5.7 million care-dependent persons are assisted at home, 4.9 million of whom receive care at home (3.1 million relying on family members). Women devote 44.3 percent more time to unpaid care work than men; 4.3 million women hold “mini-jobs,” due to care obligations. In 2023, 67 percent of all mothers with at least one child under 18 worked part-time, compared to 9 percent of fathers. Even among childless workers, the part-time rate for women (39 percent) is double the male share (16 percent).
The CDU’s “economic wing” wants to eliminate the right to part-time work introduced by former Family, then Labor, Minister Ursula von der Leyen. Merz has publicly denigrated part-time work as a “lifestyle” choice: “With four-day work weeks and work-life balance policies, we will not be able to sustain the prosperity of this country.”
Merz is ostensibly oblivious to the real working lives of his compatriots. The Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (German Trade Union Confederation) reported that Germans put in 1.2 billion hours in “overtime” in 2024, equivalent to 750,000 full-time positions; 638 million (53.6 percent) of those extra hours went unpaid. Among persons in home-office settings, 52 percent work overtime, compared to 31 percent with on-site workplaces. Among 31,000 laborers surveyed between 2020 and 2024, 44 percent worked more hours than stipulated by their contracts; 15 percent received no additional compensation—earnings that could be counted towards Betriebsrente or used for “private investment.”
Exhibit C: The Gender Pension Gap
Women, on average, live longer, earn less money, spend fewer hours in paid labor, and evince shorter working lives, adding up to a significant pension gap. Last year, 21.5 percent of women aged 65+ were at risk of poverty, versus 17.5 percent of men in the same age group. Solo mothers are particularly vulnerable; most fathers have no such problem.
Since 2021, 75 percent of the Grundrente beneficiaries, supplementing pensions of low-wage workers, have been women. While male pensions average €25,600 per annum, women receive €18,700, a 27.1 percent gap; without survivors’ benefits, the gap equals 39.4 percent. In 2025, 38.2 percent of women had to make do with pensions below €1,000. Statutory benefits alone run 66 percent higher for western men, explaining why only 18 percent of women own stocks, equity funds, or retirement securities.
The impact of Merz’s gender-blind pension reforms will be far from gender-neutral in Wirtschaftstandort Deutschland.
