Women that Siemens has promoted include Veronika Bethke, whose twin sons attend the firm’s day care center GORDON WELTERS FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

IN A COUNTRY where women find it particularly challenging to combine career and family life, Veronika Bethke enjoys something of a nirvana.

Ms. Bethke, 36, the mother of 3-year-old twin boys, conducts management training at Siemens, the German engineering giant. Since returning from an 11-month parental leave in 2008, she has worked largely part time and, when needed, from home. Her children are at a childcare center sponsored by Siemens just steps from her door.

Compared with the United States, Germany, and much of Europe, are late to the party of corporate gender diversity. But Ms. Bethke’s employer - a multinational company employing 405,000 people in 190 countries to make everything from highspeed trains to medical equipment - is one of the big European corporations that made waves in just the past two or three years trying to attract, retain and promote talented women.

In 2008, Siemens was the first company on the DAX 30 index of blue-chip German companies to appoint a woman - Barbara Kux - to its executive board. A second woman, Brigitte Ederer, was named to the board last summer, as head of corporate human resources, raising the share of women in the Siemens executive suite to 25 percent. That is nearly triple the average of 8.5 percent across German companies and double the European Union average of around 12 percent. (In the United States, roughly 40 percent of all private-sector managers are women, according to the Government Accounting Office.)

“European companies are waking up ? but most are just starting these efforts,” said Herminia Ibarra, a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Insead, the European Institute of Business Administration . “They are realizing that it’s really about changing the culture .”

That involves more than company day care centers or more flexible hours. Family friendliness is common, Ms. Ibarra noted, “but that is not what’s going to get you women at senior levels.”

Despite efforts to recruit ever more women into management, the number of female leaders dwindles dramatically the closer one gets to the top.

Workplace analysts call this phenomenon the “leaking pipeline,” and its effects have proved stubbornly consistent across industries and national cultures, despite ever-growing numbers of women earning university degrees and aspiring to careers.

“I don’t really think there’s an intake problem anymore,” said Laura A. Liswood, secretary general of the Council of Women World Leaders, a group for former female heads of state and government.

She noted that 50 percent to 60 percent of university graduates in the developed world are women. “It’s an upgrade problem,” she said.

Eileen Taylor, global diversity manager of Deutsche Bank, noted “these assumptions that the reason the pipeline is leaking is because the women are going off to have babies.” But an analysis her bank conducted last year found that no more than 5 percent of its women were on maternity leave at any given time.

“We all had this mystical notion that if you put all of these women into the pipeline, it would fill up on its own,” Ms. Liswood said.

Ms. Bethke sees the widening gender gap up the corporate ladder in her management training courses. Of the 24 participants in each class - who must all be nominated by their bosses - the vast majority are men. Deutsche Telekom announced ambitious voluntary quotas last spring, the first big German company to do so. The plan is to raise the ratio of female managers to 30 percent by 2015, from about 13 percent now.

Many companies have shied away from numeric gender targets, fearing to stigmatize women as “quota hires.” But Mechthilde Maier, Deutsche Telekom’s head of diversity, disagreed. “The quota is not the goal,” she said. “It is an instrument for change.”

Viviane Reding, the European Union’s justice commissioner, has hinted at mandating a 30 percent board quota for women across the Union by 2015 if companies fail to get there on their own.

A survey last year by the World Economic Forum found that, among 600 large companies, managers most often cited a “masculine or patriarchal corporate culture” and “lack of role models” as among the biggest obstacles for would-be female leaders.

Dismantling such barriers requires employers to take a hard look at gender initiatives.

Ms. Taylor, of Deutsche Bank recently began directly involving top managers in the grooming of talented women. Since September 2009, the bank has paired 30 women with mentors from its executive committee - all 12 of them men. One-third of the women are already in “new or broader roles.”

A 2010 study of 4,500 business school graduates found that both men and women who had mentors at the top of their organizations got promoted at comparable rates.

There was a stark difference, however, in access to top executives: Nearly two-thirds of the men surveyed said they had a mentor at the C.E.O. or executive-committee level, compared with 52 percent of the women.

Simone Siebeke, a vice president at the cosmetics division of Henkel, a global consumer products group based in Dusseldorf, benefited from exposure early in her career.

Henkel has no formal mentoring program for women. But after about five years in the company’s purchasing division, Ms. Siebeke’s boss recommended her to run the office of Henkel’s executive committee. The role gave her daily contact with the C.E.O. and others in senior management, and a seat at every top-level meeting. Two and a half years later, she said, she was approached to become the head of human resources.

“This would not have happened if they had not known me,” she said.


By NICOLA CLARK