As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect lives around the world, it is becoming clear that the pandemic and its economic fallout are having a regressive effect on gender equality. Sociologist Jutta Allmendinger recently claimed the pandemic will set Germany back 30 years in terms of the equality achieved between men and women. Mothers, in particular, are disadvantaged by existing containment strategies. On March 23, the Thomas Mann House, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, and the American Council on Germany hosted a discussion with Jutta Allmendinger, President of WZB Berlin Social Science Center, and Richard V. Reeves, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; and moderated by Birte Meier, Journalist, ZDF, whose residency at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles to work on “Equal Pay in California and what Germany can learn from it” was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
