“The career kink occurs for most women between 30 and 40 – the quota does not help.”
No time right now?
With the video and podcast format Changerider, Etventure founder Philipp Depiereux and t3n want to take away people’s fear of digitization and change. In the current episode, Katharina Wolff “drives”. She is the editor of the “first business magazine from a women’s perspective”.
Strive is the name of the new magazine that has been available in stores this week and is supposed to be the feminine answer to Manager Magazin. Despite this female empowerment ambition, Wolff is not a supporter of the women’s quota. “Of course I’m not blind. I see what is happening and what is not. ”She argues that we should start earlier than the planned regulation for the quota of women on company boards. “The career kink occurs for most women between the ages of 30 and 40 and as a rule they are still in middle management.” That is the dangerous phase in which it is a matter of supporting women and preventing them from making this career kink comes. She sees herself as very privileged because of her independence and has never felt a “glass ceiling”; but she knows the phenomenon from advising many companies. “This is where companies have to start by promoting better care options, also within the company. By offering management positions that can be shared or worked part-time. ”Wolff is convinced that if real gender parity could be achieved in middle management, that would also pave the way for women in executive or supervisory board positions. “I understand every quota advocate, I still don’t like the instrument, but something has to be done, I think we all understand that.”
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“We are a management full of men here – a woman brings too much unrest”
With her personnel consultancy D-Level, Wolff has already parted ways with a customer in the past because he explicitly wanted to fill a position with a man and excluded women as candidates. Back then it was said, ‘We are a management full of men and we believe that a woman brings too much unrest’. “We said then we wouldn’t take the job,” Wolff says in the Changerider.
Wolff regularly encounters reservations about employing women of a certain age. “We have a customer for whom we have filled four or five management positions, three of them with women. Of these three women, two came to him in the first three months and said, ‘I’m pregnant’ and were also out of the company pretty quickly on sick leave. You can’t blame them for that, but it pays off completely on this pattern of thought and behavior, ‘Oh God, if I hire a woman of a certain age, she could get pregnant and then it could turn out really badly’. “Wolff experiences also the other examples. In the case of two other customers, the candidate announced in the application process that she was pregnant, but she presented a precise plan of how she intends to deal with this situation and when the employer can expect her. “With their behavior, women have completely broken up a thought pattern and I believe that in the future these companies will say to every woman who becomes pregnant, ‘Oh yes, cool, how did you imagine it?’ Instead of immediately stamping that ‘it can don’t work ‘. ”Wolff is convinced that a lot of transparency is needed to break up patterns of thought and behavior.
Wolff would also like to make a small contribution towards female empowerment with her new Strive magazine, in which she makes role models visible in the hope that they will encourage them to go their own way.
“Manager Magazin internally calls itself ‘Bunte auf Testosteron’ – that says it all”
But why do you actually found a print magazine in the middle of at least two crises – on the one hand the corona crisis and on the other the media crisis with falling circulation and advertising revenues? At least the former, Corona, was a trigger for Wolff in this regard. “If such a change of life, as caused by Corona, can come so quickly, then you should think about what makes you happy,” says Wolff in the Changerider. She then went back to her moments at some point, so what did she always want to do at some point? “One of them was actually a magazine. I then researched how to make a good online magazine, because print is dead. “
But then Wolff realized relatively quickly: Print is not dead at all. One reason is the advertising revenues in the online sector. 70 percent went to Google and Facebook. “The remaining 30 percent is shared by the entire media world. Not only publishers, TV, radio, but also every influencer and blogger. Building a profitable company on this is almost impossible. ”She admits that in many areas print actually works difficult, especially in the news area, where online media and even Twitter are faster. “Print always works great when intellectual property meets physical product. Then something very magical arises, namely a willingness to buy. So it was quickly clear: Print it is. “
The orientation “Business magazine from a women’s perspective” was created because it is part of the target group. She was often annoyed about Manager Magazin because it was shaped by the male advertising world. “Internally you call yourself ‘Bunte auf Testosteron’, I think that says it all.” She once counted in five issues of Manager Magazin how many women are depicted there. That was eight percent on average! With Strive, she wants to provide the answer to this “gaping gap in the market”. The cover story in the first issue is devoted to the question of what founders actually earn when they exit. Two founders reveal how exits actually come about, what drives founders, whether it is even worth setting up a business, and much more.
“If you become a role model yourself, other role models will follow”
Wolff also speaks about a moment of failure in the Changerider, in this case from her own early days. Your most embarrassing moment comes from your hit time. “I sang Schlager from 14 to 25 years old, I was practically hopping from one embarrassing moment to the next.” But there was a low point anyway – this and other topics in the Changerider video.
Wolff nominated Verena Hubertz, founder of Kitchen Stories, for another Changerider trip. For Wolff, she is a role model because she not only had the courage to found a company, she has also managed an exit and is now running for the Bundestag.
Her appeal is aimed primarily at women to dare to tell their own story. “If you become a role model yourself, other role models will follow.”
Do you also know lateral thinkers, game changers and tireless optimists who stand up for digital change? Nominated you as a Changerider passenger! These and all other consequences are as Video and detailed discussions in the podcast Apple Podcast, Soundcloud and Spotify available or read in the Changerider book: “Changerider: Pioneering spirits instead of doubters: How courageous doers from politics, business and society shape our future” – wherever there are books and on changerider.com.
