The Female Deputy - Why individual success stories cannot absolve structural inequality.

From the Mother to the Maiden, from the Femme Fatale to the Muse: cultures have always relied on female archetypes to make women legible. They promise orientation, clarity, and meaning—but at the price of reduction. The psychologist Carl Jung famously understood archetypes as universal symbols, recurring figures that shape mythology, literature, and real-world behavior alike. Women, in this view, are less perceived as individuals than as embodiments of timeless roles—nurturing, innocent, dangerous, inspiring.

These archetypes have proven remarkably resilient. They migrate effortlessly from ancient myth into modern media ecosystems, where they are endlessly recycled, rebranded, and monetized. When Meghan Markle launched her now discontinued podcast "Archetypes" examining the labels historically attached to women, her selection was telling: Diva, Bimbo, Spicy Latina. Each term carries a dense load of cultural expectation—too loud, too sexual, too much, never quite right. What unites them is not description but discipline: they police behavior by framing deviation as a flaw.

Yet there is another archetype, less overt but no less powerful: the Deputy.

Who is she, you might ask?

Definitely not the rebel or the disruptor. She is the exception that proves the rule. Not merely a Lean-In success story, she is also someone who interprets her own trajectory as universalizable—proof that “it can be done,” and therefore, implicitly, that those who do not rise simply did not try hard enough. Her biography becomes a moral yardstick. Structural barriers dissolve in the glow of personal achievement.

In this role, success curdles into substitution. One woman stands in for all others. Representation is mistaken for resolution. And solidarity quietly gives way to self-congratulation. Baking in the 1-in-a-million-feeling of simply being better?

The deputy does not deny inequality outright. She simply no longer recognizes it as relevant—to herself, and by extension, to anyone else.

Reality, however, paints a different picture. 

According to the Federal Statistical Office in Germany, only 29.1 percent of leadership positions are held by women, despite a nearly equal share of employed women and men. This number has been stagnating for years, while in the rest of Europe, the situation of women in leadership positions is at least numerically better, with an EU-wide average of 35.2 percent. 

What is more, women still don't make as much money as men. The 2025 figures show that German women earned on average 16 percent less than men. This figure reflects the so-called unadjusted gender pay gap.  If structural factors such as the higher proportion of women working part-time, differences in education, or career paths are taken into account, the figure is six percent. This compares men and women who have similar qualifications, do the same work, and have similar career paths in comparable industries.

So, it's hardly surprising that the EU-wide Gender Equality Index 2025 suggests that Germany has the most room for improvement in the domain of work, where it ranks 25th with a score of 63.9 points - explainting that: "This result is mainly due to a low score in the subdomain of segregation and quality of work (49.9 points, 26th in ranking). However, the lowest score overall is in the domain of power, with a score of 47.5 points (10th in the EU)." 

People who are familiar with these numbers understand that these figures describe ist not a residual inequality gradually yielding to progress, but a structural issue, a stable configuration of disadvantage that reproduces itself across generations of working women. 

Occupational Segregation and Its Compounding Effects

A foundational driver of both the leadership gap and the gender pay gap is the persistent horizontal and vertical segregation of the German labor market. Horizontal segregation—the concentration of women in specific sectors such as care, education, and social services—feeds directly into the pay gap, as these sectors are systematically undervalued in wage-setting processes. Vertical segregation, the underrepresentation of women at senior levels across all sectors, compounds this: even in female-dominated industries, leadership positions are disproportionately held by men, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the "glass escalator."

Critically, these two forms of segregation are not independent. The devaluation of feminized work is not simply a market outcome; it is partly constitutive of what counts as "leadership" in the first place. Sectors with high female participation tend to see their management roles defined in narrower, less prestigious terms, which in turn depresses both compensation and visibility.

The Architecture of Working Time

Germany's tax and social policy framework has long structured incentives in ways that entrench gendered divisions of labor. The Ehegattensplitting—the joint taxation of married couples—creates a well-documented disincentive for the lower-earning partner, statistically the woman, to increase paid working hours. Similarly, the historically underdeveloped infrastructure for full-day childcare and all-day schooling has made part-time employment not a preference but a structural necessity for many mothers.

This matters for leadership pipelines in a specific way: part-time employment in Germany is heavily penalized in terms of career progression. Reduced hours are frequently interpreted—by employers and organizational cultures alike—as a signal of reduced commitment, foreclosing access to the informal networks, sponsorship relationships, and high-visibility assignments through which advancement is actually achieved. The result is a compulsory detour that many women cannot exit without systemic support that remains inadequate.

Organizational Cultures and the Persistence of Homosociality

Beyond structural incentives, organizational sociology points to the role of homosocial reproduction—the tendency of those in power to recruit, mentor, and promote individuals who resemble themselves—as a durable mechanism of exclusion. In contexts where senior leadership is predominantly male, this operates as an invisible but powerful filter. It does not require explicit discrimination; it functions through the naturalization of particular leadership styles, availability norms (such as expectations of long and inflexible hours), and informal criteria of "fit" that were historically constructed around male career biographies.

The stagnation of the 29.1 percent figure is, from this perspective, precisely what homosocial reproduction predicts: absent deliberate disruption, the composition of leadership tends toward self-replication. Voluntary corporate commitments to gender parity have, in Germany as elsewhere, shown limited efficacy in the absence of binding targets—a conclusion supported by comparative evidence from countries that have implemented mandatory board quotas.

The Role Model Deficit as a Feedback Mechanism

The observation that women "look upward and see few women there" is more than a motivational observation. Role model effects operate through multiple channels: they shape the perceived attainability of advancement, influence occupational aspiration formation at early career stages, and affect the accumulation of the social capital necessary to navigate organizational hierarchies. Where female leaders are absent or exceptional, women receive an implicit and repeated signal that their advancement is contingent on circumstances unlikely to apply to them—a rational updating process that, aggregated across the workforce, produces measurable reductions in aspiration, negotiation behavior, and willingness to pursue advancement.

This constitutes a genuine feedback loop: leadership underrepresentation suppresses the aspirational and behavioral preconditions for closing that underrepresentation. It is self-reinforcing in character, which explains why incremental progress remains slow even when explicit barriers have formally been removed.

All of this is empirically verifiable.

And yet, deputies engage in maximum denial of those facts. Don't get me wrong, they are probably not bad people, but as Eleanor Herman put it in Off with her Head, they support the patriarchal handbook and obey it unquestioningly.  One of those people - a mid-fifties academic, and, by all accounts, a very  thoughtful woman - recently said to me: 

“My lived experience doesn’t reflect this. I’ve always had female role models. We should discuss women’s careers only in a positive context.”

What triggered her? 

A fairly simple question of whether women simply lack the ambition to move into leadership positions, or whether there are deeper, structural issues in German society and German work culture. 

The Women in the Workplace report by Lean In and McKinsey had identified a statistically significant ambition gap between men and women. Eighty percent of women aspire to the next career level; among men, the figure is 86 percent. 

Now, one could say only 6 % that is not a lot. 

True, but statistically significant doesn't mean in large numbers; it refers to an observed result that is unlikely to have happened by random chance, suggesting a real effect or relationship exists. 

As usual, in the media, the suspicion quickly arose that women simply don’t want to be in leadership roles badly enough. 

For me, this reading falls short.  

The deputy, however, buys into precisely that narrative: the idea that women, as a group, are somehow lacking. More than that, her words practically scream privilege—paired with unrealistic expectations and a deeply paternalistic image of womanhood. What presents itself as confidence curdles into condescension.

In doing so, she fails to acknowledge that other women may have lived—and continue to live—a fundamentally different reality in their workplaces. One shaped not by individual choice or effort, but by structural constraints she herself has managed to evade. Her success is read not as contingent, but as normative; her path not as exceptional, but as instructive.

This is where the deputy becomes dangerous, because she tries to render inequality invisible—replacing systemic analysis with personal anecdote, and collective experience with individual triumph. 

Yet, no individual biography can negate or explain away these differences—certainly not if the narrative of leaning in (more effort, more optimization) is taken to mean that discourse about women in the workplace should be confined to positive stories. Under such conditions, meaningful conversation would become impossible. We would no longer be able to discuss women and their careers candidly. 

Michelle Obama, former U.S. First Lady, may have had it right. In 2018, she said that the idea that women could simply “do more” and thus overcome career barriers is an illusion. She emphasized that women often cannot “have it all at the same time,” and that structural hurdles cannot be overcome by sheer force of will alone.

Why are we so eager to blame women for their perceived shortcomings rather than admit the system is crooked? Is that really such an inconvenience to accept facts instead of framing? Wouldn't it be easier to work with the cold, hard, and problematic truth to find an actual solution instead of silence?

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References: 

https://medienrot.de/pr-branche-gender-pay-gap-erhoeht-sich-zahl-der-frauen-in-fuehrungspositionen-sinkt/ 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/03/michelle-obama-lean-in-sheryl-sandberg

https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/karriere/man-kann-nicht-sein-was-man-nicht-sehen-kann-5252

researchgate.net/publication/264684932_The_Influence_of_Role_Models_on_Women%27s_Career_Choices 

https://www.managerseminare.de/ms_Artikel/Fuehrung-Weibliche-Fuehrungskraefte-gelten-haeufiger-als-Vorbilder-als-maennliche%2C284096