德国女高管敦促女性勿因孩子弃事业_BEC初级作文

德国女高管敦促女性勿因孩子弃事业

As one of the few German women who has been on the board of a major company, Regine Stachelhaus wants the country’s women to stop leaving work when they have kids.

It’s a gray Sunday afternoon and Regine Stachelhaus is at the Stuttgart airport, a place that she knows well after years of work travel, including commuting to Düsseldorf for her most recent job from her home in a nearby Southwestern German village. Instead of a business suit, Stachelhaus is dressed casually in jeans and a sky-blue sweater set that matches her eye shadow. She rushes into the noisy Panorama restaurant above the main departures desk and apologizes profusely for being an hour late—her husband had an emergency and she had to drop him off at the hospital.

Stachelhaus, 58, settles into a table, orders a coffee and explains that she didn’t leave her career when her first son was born 27 years ago. She didn’t slow down her 12-hour days after she and her husband adopted their second son—then a 16-year-old refugee from Eritrea—five years ago. She doesn’t regret missing her first son’s first steps or being on an international work trip during his first day of kindergarten. While she climbed the corporate ranks, her rock musician husband stayed at home with the kids.

德国女高管敦促女性勿因孩子弃事业1

The intense focus on her career paid off. Stachelhaus became a rare paragon of female achievement in Germany, a country whose record of women in the workplace makes America’s hand-wringing over the issue seem unwarranted. By 2010 she became only the third woman to break into the top management circle of a DAX 30 company (the top 30 German biggest companies listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange) when she took a job as Chief Human Resources Officer at E.ON, the world’s largest investor-owned electric utility. In the U.S., women make up 15.7 percent of Fortune 500 company boards, according to a Deloitte study, compared with 8.2 percent of a sample of 600 listed companies in Germany.