Switzerland has one of highest rate of caesarean births in Europe; many Swiss employees deem working environment more important than salary; and other news in our Wednesday roundup.
Swiss population increasingly questions conventional gender roles
Acceptance of same-sex parenting has increased by 25 percent in the past 10 years.
In 2023, two-thirds of 15- to 80-year-olds in Switzerland believed that children can also grow up happily with same-sex couples. This is what emerges from an analysis published by the Federal Statistical Office on Tuesday.
Regarding the division of roles, only around a quarter of respondents believed that men should be main breadwinners. A third thought that women were better at caring for young children.
Ten years earlier, these figures were 39 and 51 percent, respectively.
When asked about their preferred division of paid work, more than half said that both parents should work part-time. In reality, however, couples in which the mother worked part-time and the father worked full-time continued to dominate, at 46 percent.
For many Swiss employees, working environment is more important than wages
This is the conclusion of a study published on Tuesday by Swissstaffing in collaboration with the GFS Zurich research institute.
Some 68 percent of respondents cited a good working environment as the most important criterion when choosing a job – even ahead of salary. Furthermore, almost half consider flexibility in terms of time or location to also be essential.
However, priorities differ greatly between generations.
Generation Z, for instance, places great value on wages and job security.
In contrast, workers over 50 are more likely to seek flexibility and satisfaction from their jobs.
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Speeding duck couldn’t…duck the radar
A radar image of a speed offender caught in central Switzerland revealed that the culprit was not only a duck, but likely a repeat offender, local authorities said.
Police in the town of Konzig, near Bern, were astounded when they went through radar images snapped on April 13th to discover that a mallard was among those caught in the speed trap, the municipality said on its Facebook page.
The duck was caught going 52 kilometres an hour in a 30-km zone, the post said.
The story, first reported by the Berner Zeitung newspaper on Monday, got even stranger.
It turned out that a similar-looking duck was captured flying in the same spot at exactly the same speed, on exactly the same date seven years earlier.
The municipality said it had considered whether the whole thing might not be a belated April Fool’s joke or a “fake” picture.
But the police said it was impossible to doctor images or manipulate the radar system.
The computers are calibrated and tested each year by Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Metrology (METAS), and the photos taken are sealed, the municipality explained.
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Rate of Caesarean sections in Switzerland is one of highest in Europe
In 2023, one-third of all births were by cesarean section, the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) reported on Monday, with planned procedures outnumbering, at 55 percent, emergency ones (34 percent).
This figure places Switzerland, alongside Italy, among the European countries with the highest rates of c-sections.
Cantonal differences are marked, with cesarean birth rates of 41 percent for Schaffhausen, and 40 percent for Zurich and Zug.
At the bottom of the ranking are Thurgau and Appenzell Ausserrhoden, as well as all the French-speaking cantons, where rates fall below 29 percent.
Vaud and Geneva saw the sharpest drop in these procedures over 10 years to reach 27 and 29 percent, respectively.
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