Investigative journalist Birte Meier on her legal dispute with ZDF and how it feels to be the “Jeanne d’Arc of the wage gap”.
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Birte Meier’s CV contains many stations. She worked as a reporter for the ZDF investigative magazine frontal 21, has received several awards for her research and was a fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. And there is a long litigation with him in it ZDF: Since 2015, Birte Meier has been trying to convince German courts that the broadcaster paid her less than her male colleagues as a woman. In 2020, she won a victory that is significant beyond the media industry: The Federal Labor Court found that the Pay Transparency Act, according to which one can obtain information about the salaries in a company, also applies to employee-like employees. In a Berlin pastry shop, the 51-year-old tells how she became an investigative journalist on her own behalf.
