Germany really isn’t the progressive trailblazer it wants us to think it is

IWomen are paid less relative to men than in most of Europe, far fewer go to university and vanishingly few major German businesses have many women at the top

t has been dubbed “Screw, Promote, Fire” or “the Reichelt system”. Julian Reichelt, the editor of Germany’s biggest tabloid, Bild, would allegedly message new female trainees over Instagram to invite them for dinner. What followed was a whirlwind affair, successive promotions and then the fall from grace.

But this week, it was Mr Reichelt who found out what it was like to fall. The original allegations about him were published by Der Spiegel

magazine in March, but after they were picked up and further investigated by The New York Times this week, Bild’s owner Axel Springer gave the editor the chop.

Springer, you see, has big ambitions for its US political site Politico and American corporate culture does not take kindly to these sorts of shenanigans.

In much of Germany, by contrast, such misdemeanours are seen as small matters. After Der Spiegel’s

investigation, Mr Reichelt was only given a slap on the wrist. It seems that the matter was no threat to business until it went transatlantic.

There are two faces to Germany. The one we hear most about is the lofty progressive side, which constantly lectures other countries about tolerance and following the rules. Then there’s the rest of the country: corrupt, rigid and, in some parts, conservative to the point of backwards. Women are paid less relative to men than in most of Europe, far fewer of them go to university and vanishingly few major German businesses have many women at the top. So it’s not as if the Bild scandal came out of nowhere.

Of course, there is nothing surprising about older, powerful men using their status to sleep around. But there is a difference between that and what appeared to be an institutionalised company harem system in which sex determines pay and promotions (Springer denies that the problems at Bild reflect anything about its wider culture).

Bild was the first to condemn poor treatment of women and polygamy among Muslim migrants to Germany and a few years ago the paper even published (and then retracted) a fabricated story about an Arab “mob’s” mass assault on women. Perhaps the paper should have looked first at protecting women closer to home.

S till, despite its prudishness, the United States is no stranger to scandal. The Wall Street Journal has just published new allegations about Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder was apparently sending flirty emails to a woman in middle management a decade ago until Microsoft’s lawyer told him to cut it out – a storyline more suited to David Brent than the world’s once-richest man.

In America, these things have traditionally been policed by litigation, which in effect can mean the richest party can act with impunity. Now, though, there’s a new weapon: public shame. That in turn has brought about a shift in legal customs. Dirty old men have to be more careful.

O

n the topic of disgrace, the former health secretary Matt Hancock was subjected to a fresh round of public embarrassment last week after his job offer from the UN to advise developing countries on Covid recovery was withdrawn.

Various reasons have been given, like the realisation that the UK’S Covid record was perhaps not one to emulate, or the custom that currently elected officials aren’t meant to take UN jobs (they are reserved for unemployed jet-setters, like Mark Carney and Tony Blair).

Nowhere did the UN appear to consider the rank hypocrisy of employing a man who broke his own lockdown rules to advise poorer countries on governance. Perhaps they thought he would fit right in in the aid industry.