It’s a funny little announcement that could soon electrify the cozy corridors of the top floors of company general management. Where we still come across a majority of suits and ties. If companies were to comply with the quota recommended by the High Council for Equality between Women and Men – 40% women in executive committees or steering committees in 2024 – they would have to find no less than 281 women by four years to be appointed to their highest management bodies.
And for good reason: in 2019, 81% of the members of the executive committees or steering committees of SBF 120 companies are men. The figure is known. The profile of the 267 women who joined the holy of holies of the largest French companies is much less so. This is the whole point of the exclusive study launched by L’Express with Heidrick & Struggles on the feminization of the SBF 120 comexes, the main results of which we revealed yesterday.
One of the major lessons of this study is that the gender imbalance in these governing bodies is not only quantitative: it is also “qualitative”, so to speak. Among the 267 women members of the SBF 120 executive committees, only a third occupy operational positions. Two-thirds hold functional positions. It’s exactly the opposite for men. Or to put it another way: 88% of operational positions in executive committees are occupied by men. However, these are obviously the positions that concentrate the most power. And among functional positions, women are mainly represented in marketing-communications, human resources and legal functions. For example, only 20% hold a financial position.
This very gendered distribution of positions in the executive committees is obviously an additional imbalance, which comes on top of the monetary imbalance. And which penalizes companies, whether they like it or not, in their economic performance and their societal reputation.
Because gender diversity hides others, as our study also reveals. When we look closely at the profile of women members of COMEX, we see that they have a more diverse background than that of men: for example, they are twice as likely to have left university – and a little less likely to be graduates from major schools only. They are also a little younger – 51 years old on average compared to 54 years old for men. We can therefore assume that the opening of the boards of directors to women could result in a greater diversification of profiles, in terms of training, age, nationality, etc., as was observed during the feminization of boards of directors imposed by the Coppé-Zimmermann law.
How to find the 281 missing women? The debate is (already) raging within employers and among governance specialists. Some, like Guy Le Péchon (from the Gouvernance & Structures firm) believe that companies must be given time to build up a pool. Others, like the academic Michel Ferrary, assure that women are there: you just need to know how to spot them and want to promote them. Thus, a group like LVMH has 65% women in management… but only 17% in the executive committee! Look for the error… For Michel Ferrary, the threshold of 40% women in the executive committees is largely achievable: “you just need to do forward-looking employment management” (sic).
That said, we should probably not only put pressure on businesses. Other levers exist. We are thinking in particular of education and professional guidance. And there, it is clear, four years will not be enough.