Dusseldorf Germany is in the middle of a skills shortage. In August 2022, almost 890,000 vacancies were registered with the Federal Employment Agency in Germany. Increased immigration and job automation are often discussed as solutions. But what about the many parents who currently work part-time or are not available for the job market due to a lack of compatibility between family and work?
In fact, the employment rate of parents with at least one child under the age of six was 63.4 percent in 2019 – however, almost two thirds of working mothers also work part-time. In the Handelsblatt podcast Rethink Work, Eva Maria Klimpel, founder of the Momjobs job platform, and Roman Gaida, Head of EMEA at Mitsubishi Electrics and author of the book “Working Dad”, talk about what companies and politicians have to do to parents as workers to win.
Eva Maria Klimpel founded the Momjobs platform when she was only offered part-time jobs in the call center after her fourth child – despite twelve years of professional experience and academic degrees. “I sat there between diapers and carrot pulp and asked myself why there was no longer any room for me on the job market just because I want to see the children I’ve brought into the world from time to time,” says Klimpel im Interview with Handelsblatt digital boss Charlotte Haunhorst. Today, she herself places workers with family-friendly companies – although this does not explicitly have to mean part-time work.
Nevertheless, she does not want to talk about parents as a “silent reserve” for the labor market: “Everyone is screaming that we have a shortage of skilled workers. I don’t think we have a shortage of skilled workers. We have a full-time employment shortage.”
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Roman Gaida and his wife both work full-time and look after four-year-old twins. He says: “First of all, it would be good if we as a company didn’t lose mothers and fathers in the first place.” He therefore sees a duty in companies to think about parental leave as a career component from the start and not as an obstacle. Ideally, this would be discussed early in one’s career. “Reconciliation is not a unique selling point of a company, it is part of a healthy corporate culture,” says Gaida.
Klimpel and Gaida explain to what extent women have to take on a pioneering role for men in the discussion about the compatibility of family and career, to what extent the gender pay gap plays a role in the decision to take longer parental leave and when working fathers also get wry looks in the current episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work.
More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work here.