The Senate looks at gender equality at work

The objective is to achieve real professional equality between women and men in companies. And for that, apparently, no more effective method than that of quotas. A law has already proven its effectiveness. This is the Coppé-Zimmerman law, which dates from 2001. It allowed France to take first place in Europe and second in the world in terms of the presence of women on boards of directors and in the supervisory boards of listed companies.

But this law was not enough to impose more diversity in the highest strata of the company. As Annick Billon, the president of the Delegation for Women’s Rights, says: “The trickle-down strategy did not work”. Today, the executive committees and the management committees, which are the real governments of companies, bring together only 22% of women in 2020, against 19% in 2019. At this rate, we would have to wait until 2050 to achieve parity in the “comex” of SBF120 companies, the 120 listed companies.

This is the meaning of the bill tabled by the LREM deputy of Essonne Marie-Pierre Rixain. It only targets companies with more than 1,000 employees. If the text is adopted, there must be at least 30% of women among senior executives by 2027 and 40% by 2030. Companies will have two years from 2030 to become compliant. Otherwise they will have to pay a heavy penalty: 1% of the payroll.

It is also planned to publicly denounce companies that do not respect these quotas. According to the principle of “name and shame”, publishing to shame. The representation gaps will be published on the website of the Ministry of Labor, which causes bad publicity for the recruitment, but there will be a lag: the publication will not take place for five years, that is to say at the same time as the entry in force of the first quota of 30%.