2024-02-29 19:28:21
Published29. February 2024, 8:28 p.m
Gender discrimination: Doctor sues Inselspital for 5 million francs
Natalie Urwyler has been leading a legal dispute against the Bernese Inselspital for ten years. She is certain: she was denied promotion because of her gender.
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The doctor Natalie Urwyler sued her ex-employer, the Berner Inselspital, for the second time in 2020.
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She claimed damages because she had been denied career opportunities due to previous dismissal.
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The Bern-Mittelland court found the 51-year-old right. It is not yet clear how high the compensation will be.
Natalie Urwyler (51) is convinced that if she were a man, the Bern Island Hospital would have promoted her long ago after her habilitation. But because she is a woman, the hospital did not allow her to pursue a career. Now the Bern-Mittelland regional court ruled in her favor at the end of January: the judge agreed with the anesthesiologist. It has not yet been decided whether the 51-year-old will receive the five million francs in compensation demanded. The Inselspital also wants to take the verdict to the higher court. The “NZZ” reports on the case.
As early as 2018, the Higher Court of the Canton of Bern ruled Urwyler right: She had been unfairly dismissed: she received the dismissal during her unpaid maternity leave; she had previously campaigned for legally required maternity leave and equality in the hospital. In court she pleaded this and claimed revenge. The Inselspital ultimately had to pay Urwyler 465,000 francs in back wages and employ her again. The doctor is one of the first people to prevail against a corporation in court on the basis of the Equality Act.
Urwyler is demanding five million francs in damages
In 2020, the now 51-year-old sued again, this time for damages. The doctor now works at the Valais Hospital. Not only does she earn less there, but she also believes she has more limited career opportunities than at the Bern Island Hospital. If she hadn’t been fired at the time, she would have had a chance of becoming a chief physician or a professor. The Inselspital had reinstated her after the first verdict, but then immediately released her again – the relationship between her and her boss was too broken.
Urwyler is demanding five million francs in damages from the Inselspital – but she says she is concerned about much more, namely the equal rights of women compared to their male colleagues. “I want a woman’s career that has been prevented to be given a price tag,” she told “NZZ am Sonntag” in 2020. She is certain that she was not promoted at the Inselspital because she is a woman: “I clearly had a better track record than the men who became senior doctors.”
Berner Inselspital considers the demand to be unrealistic
For Urwyler’s ex-employer, the court’s ruling is incomprehensible: she had long since been released from work for the period for which Urwyler planned the promotion. The human resources manager at the Inselspital told the NZZ that she considered it “incomprehensible and unrealistic” to promote someone who no longer works for the employer in question. The hospital’s lawyer, Jörg Zumstein, also considers it questionable that a certain formal qualification – in this case Urwyler’s habilitation – should automatically lead to promotion: “If this decision stands, practically every doctor who has completed his habilitation could have a claim to be promoted from senior physician to senior physician.” According to hospital statistics, only a quarter of doctors with a habilitation are promoted to chief physician.
There is already discussion about the fact that the Bern-Mittelland court’s ruling has consequences that go beyond the Urwyler case. Will all hospitals in the future have to promote their doctors if they have a habilitation qualification? Labor law expert Thomas Geiser does not see this as the case: hospitals would only have a problem if it can be proven that a man is preferred over a woman.
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