Just weeks until the September election, Merkel government is threatening “legal measures” against large German companies that fail to implement a ‘gender quota’ by putting more women on their executive boards. In what could simply be cheap antics to garner votes from women, the Merkel government is waging a war against “male-dominated” corporate boardrooms.
Germany’s Women’s Affairs Minister Katarina Barley has “threatened legal measures if the firms fail to fix the problem within the year,” German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported on Wednesday. The Women’s Affairs Minister presented a report on the “Corporate Gender Imbalance” to the Merkel-led cabinet this week. According to the report, large German companies had 27.3 percent of women on their supervisory boards. This still isn’t good enough for the Merkel government. The State wants large companies to allocate more than 30 percent of seats on their boards to women.
German broadcaster Deutsche Welle wrote:
[Women’s Affairs Minister] Barley put the German companies on notice in an interview published on Wednesday, slamming them for having too few female executives.”This cannot go on,” Barley told Germany’s Redaktions Netzwerk.”I’ll give businesses one more year to take care of the issue themselves. If nothing has happened by then, we’ll have to intervene,” she added.Women still make up only 6.5 percent of executive boards in 106 largest German businesses, according to economics think tank DIW.Since 2016, over one hundred largest German companies are obligated to have at least 30 percent of women on their supervisory boards. However, German lawmakers have not yet introduced such a quota for the executive boards, which include all executive directors and the company head.
Despite the last-minute window dressing by Merkel and her coalition partners to win over women voters ahead of the September 24 vote, the Merkel-led government has failed to address the issues of safety and wellbeing of women in Germany.
Thanks to Merkel’s open door policy for illegal migrants from Arab and Muslim lands, child brides are on the rise in the country. Government figures put the number of child brides at 1,475, out of which 361 are under the age of 14. Instead of calling for ‘legal measures’, as the Merkel government did in dealing with the private firms, Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas proposed a ‘culturally sensitive’ law that aimed to recognise child marriages in Germany.
According to the proposed migrant-friendly law, German newspaper Bild Zeitung concluded that “a 13-year-old child bride would have to testify against her husband, saying that her well-being as a child is under threat. If neither the child nor the Child Welfare Service lodges a complaint, for all practical purposes the marriage would be declared legitimate.” The law didn’t take into account the possibility of coercion, let alone the very real prospect of ‘honour’ killing prevalent in Europe’s migrant community.
Public outrage later forced the Justice Minister to dump the draft.
The perpetrators of mass-sexual attacks, in Cologne and other German cities on the New Year’s Eve of 2015/2016, have largely gone unpunished. In Cologne alone thousands of migrant men — exclusively from Arab and Muslim countries — raped, robbed and assaulted at least 1,200 women. According to the government’s own admission, most of those attackers have managed to walked free.
The Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Cologne is located, admitted earlier this year that “most of the cases [of rape and sexual assault in Cologne] will remain unsolved.”
According to the Germany’s Federal Crime Bureau (BKA), there is more than 50 percent rise in migrant crimes compared to the figures of last year:
These new entrants make up less than 2 percent of the German population, but constitute 9 percent of Germany’s criminal population. They not only indulge in petty crime but have come to dominate serious and violent crime in Germany. Nearly 15 percent of all suspects charged with serious bodily harm, rapes and sexual assaults come from this group, the police crime report reveals. [Gatestone Institute, May 2017]
This crime wave has been accompanied by a string of terror attacks committed by illegal immigrants with Islamist affiliations that have rocked major European cities, including Berlin, where a Tunisian ‘refugee’ drove a truck loaded with 20 tons of steel beams into a busy Christmas market, killing 12 shoppers and injuring 48 others.
The barbaric practice of their female genitals mutilated is also on the rise. A recent report published by the women’s group Terre des Femmes claims that the mass-migration is driving the practice of genitals mutilation among women and minor girls in Germany. The number of victims could be as high as 58,000. Additionally, 13,000 minor girls were at the risk of undergoing the genital mutilation — a practice forbidden in Germany.
Merkel government worrying about the plight of women in higher echelons of German economy can hardly be taken seriously. If Merkel really cared about the life and safety of women in the country, she would be securing the borders.
[Cover image via Youtube]
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