Families in focus

A cluster of measures

It is not unusual for the demands of professional life to conflict with those of home life. Therefore, the Max Planck Institute offers extensive support to help you strike a balance between the two. We work with the family service company "Besser betreut", which can provide advice and arrange care for children and the elderly. We are flexible in how you arrange your working hours and a number of institutes offer the opportunity for teleworking. Reconciling the demands of family and work is also an issue involving equal opportunities. Offering men and women a level playing field can, on occasion, mean promoting the existing talents, particularly of young female scientists. We bear in mind personal circumstances that affect our employees and their partners as a whole, and make every effort within the restrictions of public funding law to put together individual packages of measures.

The Max Planck Society is the only German scientific organisation that qualifies for the non-profit-making PLC "work and family" certificate, which acknowledges its family-oriented personnel policy.

The Max Planck Society offers:

• childcare places in the home and in industry-wide day-care centres; contract with the family service company "Besser betreut" to arrange care (including for the elderly); financial subsidies for childcare at conferences
• Dual-Career Service: Help and care facilities for dual-career scientist couples
• Options for part-time working and teleworking
• Central equal opportunities commissioners and confidential counsellors in the institutes
• Guides for a constructive interface between male and female scientists
• Participation by Max Planck institutes in Girls´ Day, holiday programs for girls, student laboratories, experiments for pre-school children

Especially for women:

• W 2 Minerva Programme/W 3 Programme for the Advancement of Outstanding Female Scientists in senior positions
• Minerva-FemmeNet: a mentoring network for female doctoral students and diploma students, for postdoctoral students and those working on lecturing qualifications
• Option for female scientists to extend a fixed term contract by six months to allow for pregnancy and childbirth
• Working committee for the promotion of female scientists
• Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Foundation: supports talented young female scientists with children
• We are partners in the "National Pact for Women in MINT careers" initiated by the German Federal Government in cooperation with the political, economic, scientific and media sectors