Facts
Regina Stauffer and other kindergarten teachers filed a lawsuit against the City of Zurich for wage discrimination. The Swiss Association of Public Service Personnel (VPOD) and the Association of Kindergarten Teachers Zurich joined the lawsuit. The Administrative Court of the Canton of Zurich partially upheld the claims and ordered the City of Zurich to make retroactive wage payments. The complainants filed an administrative court appeal against this judgment with the FJA.Considerations
The FJA essentially dismisses the appeal. It holds that indirect gender-based discrimination exists if a formally gender-neutral regulation substantially and disproportionately disadvantages members of one gender without objective justification. The comparison of the salaries of kindergarten teachers with those of primary school teachers made by the Administrative Court is generally not objectionable, as the primary school teaching profession has hitherto been considered gender-neutral.
The FJA considers it permissible to take differences in actual working hours into account in terms of wages. Consideration of working hours in typical female professions such as kindergarten teachers alone does not constitute discrimination. The decisive factor is that differences in actual workloads - insofar as they actually exist - are taken into account in terms of wages, regardless of the gender of the occupational group.
The qualitative job evaluation of the kindergarten teacher function compared to primary school teachers carried out by the…