Job-Hunting in Germany? Better be a Woman.

By Jalon Cain: There is rampant discrimination against men in Western societies. Let me continue this tradition by giving an example of institutionalized pro-female bias in Germany. Obviously, since women have it so tough and not only live longer and retire earlier, they all also deserve nice cushy jobs. What better place to look for than any job related to the government?
If you’ve got a minute or two, then copy and paste the following line into Google, and look at hundreds of thousands of results:

Frauen werden bei gleicher Eignung, Befähigung und fachlicher Leistung bevorzugt berücksichtigt, sofern
nicht in der Person eines Mitbewerbers liegende Gründe überwiegen.

Roughly translated: “Women will be, given equal ability, competence, and professional achievement, preferred.” The other part of the sentence is pretty vague. In fact, the entire statement is pretty nonsensical since there is just no way that two people will ever be assessed to be exactly equal. This would only happen if you used very crude metrics. “Human resources” departments often do that, but they then normally proceed ranking applicants on an ordinal scale, from most to least desirable. If this happens, it is just not possible that you’ll end up with two candidates that are “equal” since one of them will rank higher than the other.

As I’m typing this, Google returns 274,000 results for the phrase quoted above.
If you think that this is a lot, then you should know that this sentence is a legal requirement for all job ads that related to the government. We’re talking about an enormous number of jobs here, affecting administration, almost the entire education sector from elementary school to university, the social security system, and a very large part of the health care system, among many, many others. In short, if you’re looking for a job in Germany, you are very likely to encounter this example of discrimination against men.
Needless to say, there is no preference whatsoever in fields where there is only a minority of men. Nobody cares about equality in those circumstances. I didn’t have to spend much time until I found an ad by a nursery college that counts zero men among its faculty
Of course even there they have to preferentially consider women. They’re legally bound, after all.

The hypocrisy is staggering, considering that I’ve never encountered a phrase along the lines that given equal qualifications men will be preferentially hired. I’m pretty sure that if you are an employer in Germany and dared to write in your job ad that you prefer men, you’ll find yourself in several lawsuits.
This is just one aspect of the anti-male bias that is common in Germany. Of course, Germany isn’t the only place we’re seeing things like this, but it does serve to remind that discrimination against men is a growing and global phenomenon.

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