Investigative journalist Birte Meier on her legal dispute with ZDF and how it feels to be the “Jeanne d’Arc of the wage gap”.
Interviewed by
Verena Mayer
Birte Meier’s CV contains many stations. She worked as a reporter for the ZDF investigative magazine frontal 21, has received several awards for her research and was a fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. And there is a long legal dispute with ZDF: Since 2015, Birte Meier has been trying to convince German courts that the broadcaster paid her less than her male colleagues as a woman. In 2020, she won a victory that is significant beyond the media industry: the Federal Labor Court found that the Pay Transparency Act, according to which information about salaries in a company can be obtained, also applies to employee-like employees. In a Berlin pastry shop, the 51-year-old tells how she became an investigative journalist on her own behalf.