His whole life will have been that of an intruder. A woman in a man’s world, as a student, as an engineer and as an activist. Colette Kreder died a week ago in the Paris region, she was buried on Wednesday before we learned of her disappearance.
A young female engineer in the 1950s doesn’t sound like a given. Especially when you come like her from a Mayenne family: with a blacksmith father, a merchant mother. Her luck is that her parents support her in this way after her high school years in Rennes and Laval, that she passes the competition and that she is admitted to the Ecole Polytechnique Feminine (EPF). Nothing to do with Polytechnique, the EPF had been created by an association to try precisely to increase the quotas of female engineers since girls did not have access to the grandes écoles.
As soon as she leaves, she will be hired at the Ministry of the Air and Telegraph Lines in the Telecommunications Service, where she claims to be the victim of discrimination. In the early 1970s, she left to set up her own business. It will be one of the first to do so in this sector, Soredi produces technical documentation for administrations. In 1982, she was then director of the women’s polytechnic school (the one where she had been a student). And she testifies in the Journal of FR3 while the law of Yvette Roudy, on professional equality between men and women arrives at the Assembly the next day: “Do you know that we are 6% women in industry and that more than a third of them are EPF. However, there are as many Baccalaureate C as Bachelor C. Unfortunately after the baccalaureate, high school everything first, the family then do not encourage girls to pursue engineering careers”.
In politics too, Colette Kreder finds that things are not changing fast enough. She goes up a gear when she retires, especially when she meets Françoise Gaspard and Claude Servan Schreiber with whom they will found “Demain la parité”. Together, they never stop brandishing the numbers. In the 1993 legislative elections: 19% of candidates, 6% of women elected! At the time, it has hardly changed for 50 years, when we were at 5.6% in 1946. France is the penultimate in Europe, just ahead of Greece.
Parity, parity, parity… She really pushes this word with François Gaspard and Claude Servan Schreiber. This is what France Chabod, the head of the Center des archives du féminisme in Angers, explained to me, where she has deposited all her archives: “She helped introduce this concept of parity in France, before we were talking about quotas. We said that with 30% of women on the boards of directors of companies, that would be very good. must move to parity to achieve real justice between women and men. And they have started lobbying political parties to take measures in favor of parity.”
For the 1995 presidential election, she will parade candidates Jacques Chirac, Edouard Balladur and Lionel Jospin on the stage of the Palais des Congrès to answer questions from the 1,600 representatives of women’s associations – not just feminists. All this leads to the law of June 6, 2000 on equal access of women and men to elective mandates and functions.
His fight also goes through decorations, legions of honor and others. In 2007, for his first July 14 at the Elysée, Nicolas Sarkozy must even completely review his list in which Colette Kroder counted 23% of women promoted. She publishes a press release that has the effect of a small bomb. Result: since January 2008, it’s 50-50. To push girls into scientific careers, she also created the “Women and Science” association. The ensemble will earn her two major decorations: Commander of the National Order of Merit in 2007 and Commander of the Legion of Honor in 2009. She leaves three children, including two daughters who are engineers.