Perhaps I should leave this one to Smitty — Frau Smitty ist Deutsch — but our gallant hero is probably too busy saving the world from Taliban terrorists to notice that the New York Times has decided that Germany is insufficiently feminist:
[W]hen it comes to empowering women, no Teutonic drive or deference seems to work — even under one of the world’s most powerful women, Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Many leaders in business and politics profess to want to employ and promote women. But a decade of earnest vows from the corporate sector has not dented male-dominated Deutschland AG.
“Germany is good at structural reforms, but not at cultural reforms,” said Thomas Sattelberger, human resource chief at Deutsche Telekom, which in spring 2010 stunned fellow members of the DAX 30 index by announcing a voluntary goal of 30 percent female managers by 2015.
“There is a very traditional image of women and men that was taken to an extreme in the Third Reich: female mother cult and male fraternity. These mental stereotypes have not yet been culturally processed and purged.”
Alice Schwarzer, founder of the magazine Emma and perhaps Germany’s best-known feminist, likens this mindset to “a leaden blanket across all of German society.”
Despite a battery of government measures — some introduced in the past year or so — and ever more passionate debate about gender roles, only about 14 percent of German mothers with one child resume full-time work, and only 6 percent of those with two. All 30 DAX companies are run by men. Nationwide, a single woman presides on a supervisory board: Simone Bagel-Trah at Henkel. . . .
Read the whole deranged thing. Germany has suffered much in the past century having been defeated in two world wars, and then divided by the Iron Curtain. Politically correct feminist nonsense, however, may be too much even for the most stout-hearted Germans to withstand.
