A visit to the Bear Cubs, a group of a dozen boys and girls aged four and five in downtown Berlin. Their preschool teacher is named Björn - an exception in a profession with 97.3 percent women. “I don’t feel exotic or avant-garde,” he says. But he is at the forefront of a government- and church- sponsored program to raise the profile of men in early childhood education. Their image is one of weakness and effeminacy, but (the reasoning goes) that might not be such a bad thing for children from macho immigrant cultures. And children of single mothers need positive male role models, the program’s conservative proponents argue. Empirical data on the project’s success should be available by 2013. The Bear Cubs are part of the 125-child St. Elisabeth Day Care Center, where the ratio of women to men is only five to one. Complaints about low pay are exaggerated: preschool teachers earn nearly as much as auto mechanics, and more than cooks.