BERLIN, July 8 (Xinhua) -- Germany's ruling party Christian Democratic Union (CDU) planned to implement a 50 percent quota for women by 2025 after a party commission responsible for structural reforms voted in favor of the new measure on Wednesday.
Already by 2021, a quota for women of 30 percent should apply with the share increasing step by step to 40 percent by 2023 before half of newly elected CDU board members should be women by 2025.
Although a final decision on the female quota was yet to be made at the party's federal congress in the German city of Stuttgart scheduled for early December, the commission's vote already attracted strong criticism from the party's own ranks.
Norbert Rottgen, a potential CDU candidate for the Chancellery after Angela Merkel's office ends in 2021, announced to support the voting in favor of a female quota in the CDU. However, Rottgen warned that this quota would "not be enough to win more women for the CDU."
The CDU would need to make the "special interests of women a permanent focus of its thematic and party work." Therefore, the compatibility of family life with work as well as with voluntary party work was very important.
For Astrid Hamker, president of the CDU's economic council, a debate on women's issues in the CDU felt out of place in view of the fact that the CDU already provided a female chancellor, a female president of the European Commission and also had a female party leader and three out of five heads of its federal ministries were in female hands.
"A quota is inhibiting productivity and would mean that competent, committed people would no longer be allowed to run for some offices," Christoph Ploss, deputy CDU state chairman in Hamburg told the German magazine Spiegel on Wednesday.
"The CDU should always stand for equal rights, but not for egalitarianism," Ploss said. "We should be the party that promotes competition and equality of opportunity, quotas are clearly against it."
Last week, Merkel criticized the low share of women in Germany's top 30 largest listed companies. Merkel called it "absolutely insufficient that there are still listed companies where not a single woman sits on the board. This is a situation that one cannot find reasonable."
Almost a year ago, when the share of female board members among Germany's 100 largest listed companies stood at 8.5 percent, Merkel stressed that such a low share would "border somewhere on denial" and criticized companies that only formulated a minimum goal of "zero women" for their boards. Enditem
