Women are still outnumbered by Bavaria’s police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. At the beginning of the year, the Ministry of the Interior recorded a mere 30.9 percent of women in the two security agencies across the country. This emerges from a response from the ministry to a request from the Greens in the Bavarian state parliament, which is available to the German Press Agency. For comparison: Two years earlier, the proportion was hardly significantly lower at 29.3.
“The public sector has a constitutional responsibility to promote gender equality – this includes the police. The CSU Ministry of the Interior has not made any progress here for years,” said Green Party leader Katharina Schulze. In view of the bad figures, she “cannot understand” the jubilant cries of the ministry.
In the answer, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) was quoted as saying: “In recent years there has been a continuous and overall significant increase in the proportion of women in all administrative levels and salary brackets.” Schulze sees it completely differently: “That’s a measly increase. With these little steps, it would take until 2046 for parity to be achieved with the Bavarian police.”
93 percent of police chiefs are men
According to the ministry, the proportion of women in managerial positions is even lower: 92.9 percent of the first management level of the Bavarian police, i.e. the level of the presidents, is occupied by men. With a share of 7.9 percent, women are also extremely underrepresented as heads of police departments.
Schulze called on the CSU-led Ministry of the Interior to significantly increase the proportion of women and the proportion of female executives in the police force. “The Ministry of the Interior is responsible for this.” As a positive example, she cited the Lower Saxony Police Department’s “Horizonte” management development concept for women. In addition, the assessment of part-time employees must be reviewed from this point of view.
In order to improve the proportion of women, for Schulze the compatibility of family and the highly demanding police job is central: “This includes sufficient childcare places for the children of the police officers.”
In all of Munich there are currently only ten daycare places owned by the police – for 6800 permanent positions. “It has to be more,” said Schulze. The interior minister’s response, on the other hand, says: “There is currently no further need for the police’s own childcare facilities, since the employees prefer a childcare place close to where they live.”