Swiss women celebrate their belated emancipation

Since the one-day national women's strike a decade ago, analysts say more needs to be done to assure real equality for women Keystone Archive

The year 2001 marks several significant anniversaries for women in Switzerland: it is 30 years since they were given the vote at federal level, 20 years since the equal rights amendment was passed, and 10 years since the one-day national women's strike.

Now Swiss women are looking back over the past three decades, and reflecting on what has been achieved, and what remains to be done.

Patrizia Schultz, director of the Federal Office for Equal Opportunity, says there are a number of successes to celebrate.

“First and foremost, we got the right to vote,” says Schultz. “And with that the right to political representation. Nowadays we can say Switzerland is in the top third in Europe when it comes to numbers of women represented in parliament.”

Schultz is also pleased with the way in which Swiss women are increasingly training for traditionally male jobs.

“There are many more women training to be doctors and lawyers than there were 30 years ago. We still have to do more to encourage them into fields like mathematics and engineering, but still the trend is there, and we will see real effects on society in the next 10 or 20 years.”

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Freivogel at Switzerland’s Commission for Women’s Issues says Swiss law has become much fairer to women.

“Over the past 30 years we have seen the revision of the divorce law, of the marriage law, and of the laws on sexual violence,” she says. “Then we have legislation on equality in employment, and the social security system was revised, with a very strong emphasis on gender equality.”

Swiss women now have good political representation, a wider education, and a whole raft of laws to support them. But does this mean they have achieved real equality? Freivogel is not convinced.

“What we can say is that we have achieved formal equality,” she explains. “What that means is that direct forms of discrimination have been virtually eliminated, but indirect discrimination still goes on, and that is what we have to concentrate on now. The new laws have not changed everything; we certainly cannot say we have equal opportunities now and the work is done.”

Patrizia Schultz agrees, and she believes that one of the main obstacles to real equality for Swiss women is the continued lack of a national system of paid maternity leave.

“It’s the one big failure,” she says. “We’ve been trying to get maternity leave for years now, and we’ve had various setbacks, the most recent being in 1999 when a system of paid leave was rejected in a nationwide vote.”

This gap in Switzerland’s social infrastructure is keenly felt by Ilana Ganzfried, who works as a parenthood counsellor at Bern University Women’s Hospital.

“I’m confronted by the lack of maternity leave, and indeed the lack of family policy, every day,” says Ganzfried. “I have women coming in wanting to know what their employment rights are when they are pregnant, and what sort of child care provision they might have access to, and the answers I have for them that are not satisfactory.”

Both Schultz and Freivogel are convinced that the next big campaign for Swiss women is on family policy.

“It’s a huge problem in Switzerland,” says Schultz. “There is very little day care provision for small children, and school and working schedules are virtually incompatible, so if you have two or even three children it’s impossible to work full time. You might find a part time job, but then you won’t have a career. It’s a vicious circle.”

Freivogel describes the situation on family policy in Switzerland as “deplorable”.

“We don’t have anything you could rightly call family policy, the state has to promote changes in the family structure by supporting more child care, and changing the tax systems and so on. The systems we have now in Switzerland do not promote equality within the family.”

And Ganzfried points out that with these new structures needs to come a change of mental attitude from men, both partners and employers.

“Quite often I have couples who are expecting a child coming to me for advice,” she says. “And I always ask them: ‘have you thought about how you want to structure things once the child is born? And about how you are going to share out work and child care?’

“And very often the man will say ‘it is impossible for me to work part time, there’s just no way in my job’.

“In fact,” Ganzfried continues, “I really do not believe that is the whole truth. Employers won’t think differently unless they are asked to and up to now it has been women who have done the asking – now it is the turn of the men.”

Schultz agrees. “The reconciliation of work and family is the big challenge, and if men don’t get active in the area of the home, women will exhaust themselves trying to do everything. So that is our next big task – to campaign for a society where women can genuinely combine motherhood and career.”

by Imogen Foulkes