In many sectors it is a race to the bottom salary wise, hiring kids at entry level salaries, maybe it works for some but I have seen a healthy reversal to this trend after some basket case situations due to this policy.

At the end of the day any business that has diverse workforce men, women, gay, straight whatever mix will prosper period over a bunch of old fashioned goons that an oil tanker would turn faster than.

This.

This too.

I find the whole "women are just bad at negotiations" argument complete bullshit. The simple truth is that pay advances with experience. Experience isnt just measured in years, but what you actually do in those years. Male and female graduates earn roughly the same and the gap widens around 30-35 year olds with 5 years experience. Guess what? Thats the age when a lot of women get kids and either reduce work or at least dont really want to take on more. The years when the men do their first management jobs. The gap widens from there. Its pretty obviously not a matter of gender, but the choice to have kids... and the lack of the same sort of child support you get in say the scandinavian countries. Yes, Switzerland is introducing some baby steps, but is decades behind the rest of northern Europe. Simple.


When it comes to womens rights do we get now this quota for women to be elected into boards. Because it apparently is more important what gender somebody has than the competence. I therefore would like to have a similar quota for garbage workers... because equality.

Awww. Dark humour.

I don’t think there is anything wrong in actively seeking female employees to work in a male dominated profession or vice versa as diversity is healthy for an organization, I would never hire someone who was incompetent either.

Of course there are certain jobs due to physical demands that are not going to have an equal spread of the sexes but then again I have seen more female tradespeople in Switzerland than any other country I lived in previously which is a positive aspect.

I was always surprised with how many female lorry drivers driving Swiss lorries, quite rare in the UK to see this. I suppose 'power' steering / breaks etc it's a job anyone can do without strength entering into the equation,

I believe that women should work less than man because they are supposed to stay always: physically and emotionally attractive, mentally intact, pleasing, not tired, not worn out and lovably. Longer working time can take toll of their looks and fragile attitudes.

That is why, historically a wife was a housewife who did not work so to give her full attention to her husband when he returned from work.

Or she was flirting around/had affair and gave no attention to the home coming tired husband who was also flirting around / had affair in the office with, still wanting to work, female secretaries

It’s somewhat difficult to have affinity for a rough female Swiss truck or tank driver

Have you been watching Mad Men again?

No. It was “Behind Her Eyes” on Netflix yesterday. Highly recommended romance series.

Well that's very unfair to men. Is that why I've never heard of any women chanting on the streets asking for equality in the garbage collection sector? or in construction? how many women work cleaning the sewage system?

I'm all for gender equality, but I don't think most women who openly complain about inequality actually desire equality, they just want to be better off themselves. They risk alienating men who feel that they'll be relegated to the more menial unqualified jobs. Same goes for the retirement age, there is absolutely no reason why women shouldn't retire at the same age as men, and any reason against this is simply a demonstration of the fact that some women don't really want equality but something else and they'll give any nonsense justification to argue their case.

haha, some hours ago went to my favorite gas station. There was woman refilling a 4 axle dump truck loaded with some rocks. She said some nice things about my car. So, beyond operating a large dump truck, complimenting other people's cars. I can live in this world

Probably she was reading on this thread and followed you all the way to prove all semi-retired men wrong.

this study doesn't even compare the salaries for the same jobs, it compares people in what is defined as "similar fields", e.g. an engineer with an architect or a biologist with a chemist. Many other factors are not considered or only roughly estimated, e.g. field of study or experience. The number is next to useless to talk about wage discriminiation.

lol, where did you pick that one up? Everybody pays the same % into EO, which is used both for maternity leave and to compensate employers for military absentees. Usually, maternity leave gets a few dozens of millions more contributions than military compensations.

This is still the reality for many. Many EFers as well. Some of them are quite vocal about one's autonomy, etc.

So what is this car that you drive? I hope it is not a Nissan Qashqai

My wife didn't get that memo, can you please advise her accordingly

A very interesting topic..... with alot of valid points raised.
In my view there are systematic factors which affect salary and opportunity differences but I also think it is not just men that drive and or support these factors.
I live in eastern Switzerland, which is still in my view fairly conservative / traditional. School times for families with more than one child are insane (i.e. different starting and ending times in the same school). It's almost as if the schedule is picked to ensure one parent must not work. However, alot of the Swiss mothers my wife and I know, think nothing of that and indeed are not interested in hearing our "Auslander" view on the whole issue. This is a systemic issue in my opinion, but it will need both men and women to address it.
Another anecdotal issue; I work for a large Swiss company -during a welcome day, new starters are introduced in a lecture hall setting to the various aspects of the company. The HR manager discussed their role, how we can support the company etc... and finally he mentioned how our salary gap was less than the average in Switzerland. A male colleague challenged that and asked why he was raising any salary gap as a good thing. His response was that they do in fact balance salaries at different times, but the gap arises because the men push for increases more each year.

Back to negotiating skills & persistency of asking for more.