Explaining the gender gap in contemporary German elites: Insights from biographies of 2700 German elite members

With the launch of a gender quota in executive boards of publicly traded companies in 2020, the German government has introduced a not so novel yet rare tool in the fight against the descriptive underrepresentation of women in leadership positions. The gender gap in political and other elites has been a consistent finding in international research on high-ranked political, economic and administrative offices (Bashevkin, 1985; Bürklin et al., 1997; Medeiros et al., 2019). This paper looks into the social structure that shapes German elites, and compares the socio-demographic background and career paths of women and men in leadership positions to evaluate the extent of gender inequalities in a variety of sectors. We draw our data from the first extensive study of German elites since 1997 (Vogel et al., 2021, forthcoming). Building on the positional approach to elites, elite membership was defined in terms of the occupation of a high-ranked position in the political legislative, executive and party structures, supervision or management positions in the economy, federal and state-level administration, science and academia, trade unions, judiciary, military and security, media and arts as well as civil society and religious organizations. Demographic data and career biographies of more than 2.700 individuals holding corresponding positions were coded and analyzed. We do find women’s descriptive representation to have increased since 1997 as it reaches an average of 24 percent (n = 662) across all areas investigated. However, women’s representation in the elites varies strongly across sectors: While we find women’s shares to be the highest in public sectors such as politics, judiciary and civil society where they reach up to 34 percent, military, security and the private economy show the lowest shares of women in leadership positions, ranging from 0 to 6 percent. With regard to the causes behind this pattern, we show how women possess equally high education and qualification as men. We also find women across all sectors, on average, to be two years younger than men when they enter their first high-ranked office (women: M=49.5, SD=8.42, n=515; men: M=51.7, SD=8.09, n=1653; p>.001, Cohen’s d=.27) and to report fewer children (women: M=1.83; SD=1.21, n=301; men: M=2.21, SD=1.15, n=1008; p>.001, Cohen’s d=.32). Gender quotas do not suffice as an explanation for very few areas with a higher percentage of women in elite positions were subject to quota regulations. This allows for an explanatory approach based on women’s target-oriented career-planning: As the gender bias in care work comes at a certain cost for women who aspire to a career we deem gendered structures in the division of labor to still be a determinant of success and a challenge to gender equality in leadership. The article provides an insight into the current social structure shaping elites in Germany and offers a more differentiated understanding of gendered elite careers, allowing for interpretations as to the state of gender inequality in the German elites.