“Quotas work” to reduce inequalities between women and men in the business world, hammered Annick Billon, president of the Delegation for Women’s Rights in the Senate, on Franceinfo Wednesday, November 3. According to the calculation of the Les Glorieuses collective, women will start “working for free” on Wednesday at 9.22 am, due to wage inequalities, and this will last until the end of the year.
>> Salaries: “At this rate, we will have equality in 2234”, according to the founder of Les Glorieuses
The senator of Vendée returned to the adoption by the upper house, Wednesday, October 27, of a bill which provides for a proportion of at least 30% of women among senior executives and members of corporate governing bodies of at least 1,000 employees, in 2027, and 40% in 2030.
franceinfo: What is the spirit of this bill?
Annick Billon: The bill that we voted on last week, which is still in shuttle service between the Senate and the National Assembly, proposes to take a new step. It aims to accelerate equal pay, economic and professional but obviously, we are talking here about senior executives, governing bodies. We are not talking about the lowest wages. We can make progress on these issues of wage inequalities, probably by proposing to come back with new quotas.
Introducing quotas, isn’t that an admission of failure?
Quotas work. Take the example of the Copé-Zimmermann law [qui impose des quotas de femmes dans les conseils d’administration et de surveillance], who is ten years old. Thanks to it, we went from 20% of women on the boards of directors and supervisory boards of companies, in 2014, to nearly 47%. At the global level, France is thus first in this area. So yes, it works, but it’s not everything. We also need profound changes of mentality in the way of understanding the place of women in society.
Do you think of other avenues to fight against inequalities between women and men in the business world?
I think that in the long term, we will have to find other criteria in the professional equality index to be able to move forward [si les résultats d’une entreprise sont mauvais, elle s’expose à une pénalité financière]. Look, for example, at the distribution of the sexes in the 10% of the lowest salaries of a company. There is also the issue of paternity leave. The Les Glorieuses collective, in particular, is proposing to extend it further to model it on maternity leave for women.