The view from Mollens, where Switzerland's latest earthquake hit: the Alps are still standing

An earthquake hit my Valais mountain village Saturday night, making headlines around the world (Western Switzerland hit by earthquake). I wasn’t home at the time, but the most dramatic aspect of the 3.3 Richter scale earthquake appears to have been the 250 phone calls received by police in normally quiet Sierre, on the valley floor, next to the Rhone river. The epicentre was 1 km from my village of Mollens, very close to the resort of Crans-Montana and just next to Aminona, where the three small shakes in a couple hours were also felt.

Switzerland has a history of very occasional earthquakes, so Saturday night’s “explosion”, as locals described the sound, was about on a par with the previous weekend’s New Year’s Eve fireworks, which lasted longer but were predictable. I don’t know anyone who had just made a martini Saturday night, but it sounds like it was the right moment for mixing one, as long as you aren’t James Bond.

Swiss research on noise shows more reasons to avoid it

Last week Swiss researchers showed the world, for the first time, that living too close to an airport’s noisy flight path can take years off your life. This week Swiss researchers are showing us that male birds sing at a higher pitch when they are in noisy urban areas, apparently so the females can hear them better. But the females don’t like the sound they make. Fortunately for the bird population that was studied, the males piped down and sang lower on weekends, when the motorway near which they live became quieter.

Translate that research on noise pollution to the human population and maybe guys looking for girls should slow down, be a little quieter.

And fellas, when you promise her the moon, don’t say you’ll get her there from a home near the airport, no matter how convenient that idea is to you, for your fast-paced, travelling life.

Women politicians can’t bring the country out of the gender dark ages

Scandinavian countries and companies generally have a better track record in Europe for equal work, equal pay

Switzerland continues to congratulate itself for its firm step into modern times Wednesday 22 September, when it voted to create a cabinet with women in the majority. The outside world, too puzzled by an obscure Swiss political system to say much, patted it on the back. By Friday Swiss media and politicians will be quibbling again over whether or not the cabinet (the Federal Council) is functioning as it should.

Yes, it’s great to have women actively leading the country, but Switzerland is missing the boat: most of us, and I’m a Swiss woman, are happy to see more women in politics. What we really want to see is women paid properly for their work.

No, it’s not acceptable that the country lags far behind many other developed countries and several developing ones, as far as women and work are concerned. Politicians aren’t going to change this: outmoded stereotypes will change only when the Swiss public, the famous citoyen et citoyenne, takes the initiative to become more responsible and respectful.

Women earn 24 percent less than men, according to the Federal Bureau for Equaity, for work of equal value. They are rarely found on Swiss corporate boards and they hold far fewer significant administration positions. Daycare and school hours have improved somewhat in the past 20 years, from the perspective of working mothers, but not enough. Women tend to care for the elderly, as elsewhere, often while juggling a job and children who are still at home, with incomes inadequate to allow them to pay for help.

The model of a couple where the man works fulltime and the woman part-time covers 42 percent of couples in Switzerland. Only 23 percent of couples have both partners working fulltime. You can argue that children of these couples benefit from having mother at home more often, but the price is very high: mother is devalued financially, for life, not just for the short time the kids are home. There is a moral issue here that the Swiss must face.

Start with pre-school options, school lunch programmes and after-school care

Switzerland has no excuse for taking so long to improve the situation of working women.

Making it easier for women to work on an equal level with men must start with providing flexible, family-affordable daycare and schooling options. Geneva continues its decades-old to debate over whether children should be in school on Wednesday afternoons (they currently are not) and/or Saturday mornings. It’s not the only canton  in this situation, and the obligation for children to head home for lunch every day hasn’t even made it onto the political agenda in many cantons.

The World Economic Forum’s annual Competitiveness Report 2010 ranked Switzerland number one in the world, but it ranks the country number 40, out of 139 economies, for participation of women in the labour force.

Ask the international population in Switzerland: we’ve seen how it’s done elsewhere

Most of us who are part of the international population in Switzerland have lived in countries with children who don’t suffer from attending school five days a week and who turn out to be successful, good citizens despite pre-school daycare and school lunches in the canteen. My son grew up in Switzerland but not in the state schools, which is too bad in terms of integration, but as a foreign woman, used to  working for a living, the lack of options from our village school left me without a choice. He had pre-school daycare, private school cafeteria lunches, and he’s successful as well as a good friend to me and my husband.

All of this costs, of course, but probably less in the long run than pulling mother out of the workforce for several years to make hot soup at noon. Sound family relationships might be helped by everyone coming home for lunch, but this isn’t the secret to them.

Many of the women among us have earned equal salaries elsewhere and seen our countries and companies thrive as a result. It’s hard for us to understand why Switzerland remains a backwater in this respect. “Women’s wages are in general and irrespective of the level of professional qualifications usually lower than men’s,” Helpinlaw, a legal solutions firm, advises companies. Swissinfo reported in 2009 that equal wages have been covered by the Swiss constitution since 1981 and written into the law since 1996, but in 2006 women were still earning 25 percent less than men, and the figure climbs to 31 percent in higher-level posts. Some 60 percent can be explained by differences in experience and job levels, but 40 per cent was found to be due to discrimination, according to the Federal Office for Gender Equality (Foge).

Even with the youngest workers, where family issues have not yet built up, young women with the same level of education and training as young men are earning 10 percent less after six years of employment.

Small steps are a start, but just that, not more

Foge has made some progress in helping women earn more, but the time for a big leap is here. Companies with 50-10,000 employees have had access since 2007 to a tool called Logib that allows them to check their salary systems to ensure equal wages. The head of the FOGE for the past 16 years, Patricia Schulz, was elected to the United Nations gender equality committee in June 2010, the first time a Swiss has been part of this. Maybe some of the UN work in this area will filter back to Switzerland once she takes up her new post at the end of 2010.

Foge says equal wages is its priority issue for 2010, and it has started by working with companies. Reconciling home life and work is a priority, it says.

The Swiss have watched and done little while France has raised a generation of children with daycare systems in place. France now has enough experience to start improving its multiple childcare options.

Women were 9 percent of Swiss board members in 2004 but by 2008 the number had fallen to just over 6 percent, and the country was low among European countries for boards with more than one woman according to the 2008 EuropeanPWN BoardWomen Monitor. There are exceptions, notably Migros, which skewers Swiss statistics on boards with its penchant for having well over 30 percent women.

Meanwhile Finland, which has legally required all companies since January 2010 to have at least one female board member, has produced figures showing that companies with a female CEO (chief executive officer) are about 10 percent more profitable.

Europe-wide, women are 60 percent of the workforce but hold only 10 percent of corporate boat seats.

Video, women and workplace equality, Mirella Visser

The city of Geneva’s free transport tickets for visitors is surely one of its best tricks for selling the city: never under-estimate the power of a free ride. This isn’t the first and the last time we’ll see this mentioned, but in a large US city newspaper, it will have a happy ripple effect, as long as they don’t confuse Geneva and Genoa or Switzerland and Sweden (I used to live in Minnesota, a state with a lot of smart people). Minneapolis Star & Tribune

Last-minute reminder: Americans in Geneva who are looking for fellow citizens for a Fourth of July party have two good options: the American International Club party, which requires registration (contact: admin@amclub.ch), and Democrats Abroad bring-your-own picnic at Parc Bastions in the centre of the city, open to all, starting at 15:00 and running through the evening. Both are free.

Some clichés just go round and round, like the gnomes stacking gold under the streets of Zurich and the weird hidden world of the Swiss military. Like all good clichés this last one works because there’s plenty of truth in it. I’ve been inside the mountain bunker in Lucerne which has hundreds of hospital beds and while I wouldn’t want to stay there long, it is an impressive place.

So when I had this video, made in 2000 by French TV, sent to me I had a good laugh. And then remembered something I read just yesterday, about a secret spot in Geneva: near the Molard tram stop, at the bottom of the rue de la Fontaine and Rue Toutes-Ames, you’ll find three doors, one which has a strange sculptured ornament over the door. It’s a bomb, falling on a city. Behind it? An air-raid shelter, in the heart of Geneva. Plenty more like this in Switzerland.

Bilan carried an interview 5 May with Susan Clark, the head of The Economist’s Geneva office, which has been home since 2009 to its continental Europe-Africa-Middle East operations. Clark, an American who also directs the group’s marketing operations, doesn’t give away too many secrets to explain The Economist’s success, but she does touch on the issue of why readers in Switzerland have not all been getting their magazine on Friday, before the weekend.

“It’s a logistical nightmare,” she says, since the group closed its Swiss printing operations with Ringier and moved them all to The Netherlands in February 2010. But they are trying to make sure 85 percent arrive before the weekend, so if yours is still arriving late, cross your fingers you’re part of that larger group.

Worth reading, in this week’s media:

Why more and more Americans are giving up their citizenship

Helena Bachmann, a contributor to Time Magazine, based in Vaud, has a long report in this week’s magazine about the growing number of Americans who are giving up their citizenship, a trend driven by changes in the tax situation: “According to government records, 502 expatriates renounced U.S. citizenship or permanent residency in the fourth quarter of 2009 – more than double the number of expatriations in all of 2008. And these figures don’t include the hundreds – some experts say thousands – of applications languishing in various US consulates and embassies around the world, waiting to be processed.”

Swiss see how the Swiss like to describe themselves to newcomers

Le Temps today carries a feature on an event organized by social network Glocals.com where local politicians and business people were invited to help newcomers to Geneva become better integrated. The usual caricatures of the Swiss surfaced, as they always do for newcomers, including, says the newspaper, “Punctuality, organization rather than improvisation and consensus are key words for the perfect little Swiss.”

But, the article points out, the heat was turned on when it came to discussing housing, that impossible thing to find in Geneva.

New name for GenevaLunch blog: Living in Geneva

Laila Rodriguez, a journalist and blogger for GenevaLunch, is celebrating the fact that she is no longer a total newbie to Geneva by changing the name of her blog to Geneva Living, to better reflect what it is about. The blog offers a wealth of information to newcomers to the city, as well as to the larger region. Laila also handles our events pages, and she is a wonderful source of news on a community level, for newcomers but also people who have lived here for years.

GenevaLunch has just had a facelift, with some changes that you’ll notice right away if you’re a regular visitor and others that are less apparent. Technically, we wanted to speed up the site, and visually, we want to make it easier for you to spot the wealth of good material we offer you.

We’ve become the English daily newspaper for Geneva, Lausanne and much of Switzerland

GenevaLunch has grown tremendously in the past year: we have tripled the number of regular visitors to the site in the 12-month period ending 31 March, to become the best-read source of news in English, online, in the Lake Geneva region. Growth continues to be strong and we’re anxious to continue providing the news you’ve come to expect. We have been studying the best options for small and medium companies for advertising, and we now have a good solution for these businesses, an important part of our community.

What’s changed, will change: the site loads more quickly, the news column on the home page is wider so you can read more quickly, we’ve created a highly visible box with useful links to advertisers that vary on each page, the blog for newcomers to Geneva is quickly visible at the top of the page, the most recent events and resources are also at the top of the page and we’ll be bringing you weather soon. World news and the most recent blog post for each blog, as well as our features and interviews, use a bit of Flash to catch your eye. And there is more in store, so keep your eyes open and keep returning!

GenevaLunch is staffed by a core group of seven volunteers, including an editorial team with strong local and international reporting experience. We have a larger group of some 30 occasional contributors. We have been providing top-quality community news to the international population in Switzerland since 2006.

We’ll be fixing the small glitches that are part of any web site’s update or design changes and in a few days we’ll give you a list of suggestions for best ways to use the revamped site, as we add new features.

I was puzzled to see that the Guardian has an article today on Libya, Switzerland, the European Union and the ban on travel by top Libyan officials. I read nearly to the end before I found the news peg – normally higher up in a story, but when the news is old and editors are looking for an excuse to run it late, the peg gets hidden a bit further down in the story. Here it is:

The problem was sufficiently worrying for Libya’s man in London, Omar Jelban, to convene a rare press conference at the Knightsbridge offices of the people’s bureau (embassy) to “clarify” Tripoli’s position. “It is now difficult for any EU citizen to come to Libya,” he said on Tuesday, insisting that Libya had been forced to take reciprocal action because of Swiss bad faith. “We are ready to resolve this problem with the Swiss. This is a bilateral issue that has nothing to do with other European countries.”

That doesn’t tell me why the Guardian wanted to bother running this, since there is nothing new in the story, just rehashing. I think the clue is the last sentence. My guess is that the editor couldn’t resist running this sentence, a good decision:

Gaddafi-watchers say the key to understanding these rows with the Swiss and the Americans is his acute sense of personal honour – the slight to his son, his family and to himself. In reflective moments, Libya’s diplomats must sometimes hark back to simpler times before their leader abandoned terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and came in from the cold.

Link to story in the Guardian, UK