Important decisions take too long in Germany – thinks entrepreneur Verena Pausder. A lot could be done right now.
by Sina Teigelkötter
BRIGITTE: Your book “Das Neue Land” reads in parts like a political manifesto. You are actually an entrepreneur. Where does the desire to get involved in society come from?
Verena Pausder: Sure, I could have limited myself to my “core competency”, digital education. But there is so much brewing out there: climate protection, equality, new work … Where are those from my generation of 30 to 50-year-olds who clearly position themselves on this? It is not enough to name problems and celebrate for them. We have to implement it faster if we want to shape the future.
About which we can only speculate: It is said that 65 percent of today’s primary school students will work in jobs that we don’t even know about.
So now we should try as much as possible. Before Corona, hardly anyone would have thought large-scale home office and homeschooling for ten million children were feasible. Now is the time to make sure that everyone can really take advantage of these digital opportunities and flexibility.
How can that be done concretely?
For example, we should better train girls for the jobs that become important in a digitized world.
What if they are absolutely not interested in IT courses?
Then you have to design these courses in such a way that they also address people who have not spent their entire school days at LAN parties. With a “quota from below” universities could also commit to accepting more women in such subjects. And schools would have to make sure that not only boys sit on the advanced physics course. In this way we also create more equality. Because all of these are courses that often lead their graduates to the very top.
A better work-life balance would also contribute to equality, you write in the book. What ideas do you have ready for this?
New work models such as job sharing must be implemented more widely. And it cannot be that a woman like Westwing founder Delia Lachance has to resign from her board position in order to go on maternity leave, because otherwise she would continue to be fully liable. 2020! With the #stayonboard campaign, which I launched with many supporters, I want to enable time-outs for board members by supplementing the Stock Corporation Act – so that the executive floors become more human.
Equal opportunity is another topic that is important to you. For example, they demand that 16-year-olds vote in order to have a better say. The start-up scene should also become more diverse.
And by that I don’t just mean: more women. The origin must also be more colorful. A monoculture in which entrepreneurial children like me share the cake among themselves cannot be good for a society. Anyone who has a good idea should be able to implement it, regardless of origin and environment. That’s why my husband and I are co-founders of the non-profit initiative “Startup Teens”. For five years now, her goal has been to reach 14 to 19-year-olds directly, for example via YouTube, in order to make them fit for business in mentor programs or business plan competitions.
What company ideas do the teenagers have?
Amazingly sustainable and socially relevant. I was very touched by a 14-year-old who developed an app for her district league. With it, games and referees are “matched” so fairly that influence is excluded and real equality of opportunity is possible – at least on the football field.
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Verena Pausder, 41, is one of the most famous female founders in Germany. With “Fox & Sheep”, a game app for children, the “HABA digital workshop” and the initiative “Digital Education for All eV” she has been promoting digital education for years. She initiated the platform during the Corona period www.homeschooling-corona.com. Her book “The New Land” has been published by Murmann (200 pages, 20 euros).
An energetic manifesto for more simplicity. Pausder writes her book as a big speech that shakes people up and provides many concrete ideas for business, education and politics. Can they also be implemented? This opens the discussion.
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