Childcare and Careers

When Christiane Löwe, the former head of the Office for Gender Equality and Diversity, moved from Germany to Zurich in 1989 to work as a chemist at the Empa research institute, she was quite astonished at the situation she encountered: Federal Councilor Elisabeth Kopp had just been forced to resign because she was accused of violating professional secrecy – an accusation that could not be substantiated and would have been unlikely to force a male Federal Councilor to relinquish their role. One year later, the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden had to be compelled by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland to give its female citizens the right to vote and finally comply with the Swiss Constitution, which had enshrined gender equality since 1981. “I thought it was terrible that the politicians in Switzerland simply said nothing, and nobody attempted to persuade the Appenzellers to do this voluntarily,” says Löwe.

This backwardness was also evident at her place of study: there wasn’t a single female professor and it was once suggested to her completely out of the blue that she could be happy simply being a mother. “I thought it was a pity we didn’t have any female role models,” says Löwe. She then campaigned for gender equality, first at Empa and then at the University of Zurich.

The author and publisher Denise Schmid, who until recently was the first president of the Zuniv alumni organization, was politicized in a similar way: when she started her degree in history in Zurich in 1989, there wasn’t a single female professor in the Department of History, with just the occasional visiting female lecturer. A colloquium held by the female German historian Ute Frevert really impressed Schmid and her fellow students at the time: “She was a great, smart woman! And we asked ourselves why we didn’t have any female professors.” The event led to the emergence of a group of dedicated female students. They compiled research on women’s history in a database to make it more accessible, and they set up Rosa, a magazine for gender research.

“1991 was the first time in my life that I’d been involved in a protest, a women’s strike!” recounts Schmid. The increasing awareness of feminist issues at universities was part of a broader movement at the time: women in other places were also irritated at how little had changed since women had been granted the right to vote in Switzerland in 1971. In the national women’s strike, which at the time was the biggest political demonstration since the national strike after the First World War, hundreds of thousands of women demanded that it was about time real progress was made, with equal rights for women. And when two years later the Federal Assembly chose a man instead of Christiane Brunner, who had been proposed as a candidate for the Federal Council by the Social Democratic Party, there were more large-scale protests. They worked because a woman – Ruth Dreifuss – was indeed elected.

This spirit of change also had an impact at the University of Zurich. Back in 1987, the Swiss Feminist Science Association had demanded that a body to advance the cause of women should be established – this was timed to coincide with the 120 Years of Women’s Studies anniversary, which provided a timely reminder that in 1864 Zurich together with Paris was the first university in Europe to allow women to study for a degree. The then-President, Konrad Akert, acceded to this request, but didn’t really do very much: he decided that from 1989 his lawyer Sylvia Derrer should, in addition to carrying out her existing tasks, spend one day a week acting as a point of contact for any issues of discrimination – the situation quickly proved to be frustrating because of her excessive workload.

It took a few more attempts by dedicated women, propositions and collections of signatures being submitted to the Executive Board and Zurich’s cantonal parliament before in 1991 the cross-faculty Gender Equality Commission was founded, followed in 1996 by the establishment of the University Women’s Office (“Uni-Frauenstelle”) – which today is the Office for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion – with Elisabeth Maurer as its head.

Untiring perseverance was also needed for individual women to progress in the male-dominated sciences. Denise Schmid wrote the biographies of two female physicians who worked in Zurich. The first was of Marie Lüscher, who from 1953 to 1975 was head surgeon at the Swiss Medical College – a position that would have been unthinkable for a woman at a university hospital at the time – and the second was the biography of the anesthetist Ruth Gattiker, who in 1976 became one of the first women to attain a professorship in the Faculty of Medicine in Zurich. Schmid says: “These pioneering women had to be incredibly tough. And they generally also had to decide between having a career and a family. Ruth Gattiker always said: “You can’t have it all!” These two women may have found this decision slightly easier to make because the two medics lived together, albeit officially just as “friends” and not as a couple.

However, women at the university were becoming less and less willing to put up with not having children. In the early days in particular, striking the right balance between career and family was a very important aspect of the work to promote gender equality, as Christiane Löwe also recalls: childcare and more flexible working hours were some of the first things we fought for.

When she first moved to Switzerland for personal reasons in 2003, the political scientist Karin Gilland Lutz, who has taken over from Löwe, quickly realized that the attitude taken to this subject in Switzerland had long been a very traditional one. She had grown up in Sweden and thought it was completely normal for her father to have as much of a role in childcare as her mother, even though they were both working full-time: “I grew up with the idea that your gender is completely irrelevant when it comes to your choice of profession, and I was really surprised to discover that not everyone saw it that way.” In conservative Ireland, where she had done her PhD, although all the professors at her institution were men, they gave her really good support and she then also had no trouble finding a permanent job working in academia, thanks to the lecturer system that also offers permanent positions without a professorial chair.

When she arrived in Switzerland, she was able to find a temporary position working on a National Fund project, but she quickly realized that, as a young mother, it was difficult to find a longer-term job as an academic in this country. “I then thought to myself that I could find another way to be happy and I’d rather do something else instead of focusing on mobility requirements all the time.” That’s why she made the switch from research to administration and worked in the Office for Gender Equality led by Elisabeth Maurer. “Back then, it was completely normal for people to take up administrative positions at the university after completing a dissertation.

Nowadays, it probably wouldn’t be so straightforward. Candidates are expected to know how a university works, but they need to have even more skills to do these jobs; a dissertation is no longer enough.” Löwe confirms this: “That’s essential. You need to have leadership and organizational skills and strategic abilities if you want to cover all levels, as we do. You need to communicate with different bodies. That’s because the needs in the different offices or on the Executive Board are obviously very different.”

Gilland’s background as a political scientist meant she found the university microcosm to be very exciting from an analytical perspective: “Universities are fascinating organizations that historically have evolved in a very different way to organizations in the private sector or administrative organizations. The sovereign nature of the subjects and the academic freedom mean that universities are organized in a very decentralized way and are difficult to manage. They’re not designed to converge coherently on a very specific objective.” This is because ultimately academic thinking and rigor works like this: you can’t know before you start what you’re going to discover, and you need to be open to new findings.

Sociology professor Katja Rost, who was President of the Gender Equality Commission from 2019 to 2024, also brings this external perspective on the situation in Switzerland. She grew up in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where she experienced a society in which it was just as commonplace for women to work as men and in which childcare was organized by the state. That’s why she has a particular viewpoint on women’s quotas. She recounts: “My mother was a typical quota woman. Aged thirty and a single mother, she became head of a technical college.

I was two at the time and had to go to a weekly nursery. The role of college head really should have gone to a colleague who had already been working there for 20 years. But she had to meet the GDR’s women’s quota and that’s why she was promoted. And of course she wasn’t very popular when she first started.” That’s why it’s no surprise to learn that Rost rejects fixed quotas for women, but could definitely imagine a professorial chair being awarded by drawing lots from among the best candidates to ensure that women are not disadvantaged by any subconscious bias.

As Rost spent her childhood in East Germany, she took it for granted that she would work full time and have a career of her own: “I was never a staunch feminist; I just knew what I wanted to do and followed my path. It never occurred to me that I might be discriminated against. I only encountered this issue later on through research.” When she then came to Switzerland during her degree, she found the situation she encountered in the country very backward and she thought it was strange how many Swiss women had no ambition whatsoever to pursue a full-time career – this was a judgment that she reversed once she’d spent a little longer living in Switzerland and also researched the topic. “It’s an affluence-related phenomenon,” she says. “In rich societies, women have more freedom to choose what they want to do. And the choices they make then reflect existing gender norms.” She’s convinced that this self-determination is also a sign of emancipation.

Many women don’t consider a university career to be that attractive because it is unattainable unless you are highly mobile. Just like the pioneering women in medicine mentioned above, Rost says: “An academic career isn’t just handed to you on a plate!” That’s why she believes it would be good for women to have children when they’re students, rather than waiting until they need to go abroad to further their career. She therefore thinks that the work to promote gender equality at the university should not focus entirely on the job, but should instead highlight more how female students can also have a family.

The disproportionate number of women leaving an academic career is demonstrated by the gender equality monitoring that has been conducted in Zurich since 2007. “This is very useful,” says Löwe. “We’ve now got actual figures and the issue can no longer be dismissed. Even if people say that women are given an advantage nowadays, the figures show that this isn’t true.” Gilland Lutz adds: “People’s willingness to take data on gender equality seriously has really increased. This is a good approach – not ignoring problems, but looking for solutions.”

The projection for the future clearly illustrates that there’s still plenty of work to do: if the recruitment rate stays the same, it will be 2050 before a third of professorial chairs are occupied by women. Löwe thinks this is too late. But what can be done? Löwe and Gilland Lutz agree that a key point is to have a work environment in which everyone feels comfortable. And this doesn’t just apply to both genders. The commitment to diversity stipulates that nobody should be discriminated against based on prejudices, and right now the inclusion of people with a disability is an important topic – also because this is required by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which Switzerland is a signatory. This is why from the fall the office will draw up a new policy on equal opportunities, diversity and inclusion on behalf of the Executive Board.

This year, the University of Zurich also clearly demonstrated that it wants to create a good work environment by participating in the national Sexual Harassment Awareness Day. Löwe says: “I’m convinced that if we managed to stop sexism and sexual violence as a society, lots of other things would also fall into place much better.” Although the university can’t solve all the problems that it inherits from wider society, Gilland Lutz is certain: “There may be the image of an ivory tower, but in reality the university will simply reflect all the issues that affect society at large.”