French Legislation on Board Quotas Advances - Building Gender Balanced Business

• The French National Assembly approved legislation from the governing party that would require large companies to have boards that are at least 40% female by 2016. That would be a near-quadrupling from the current level.

• But that was a reduction from the original proposal of 50%. The bill also doubles the amount of time for a company to make 1 in 5 directors a woman, to three years.

• The approved legislation would have immediate impact if it becomes law: It would requires that every one of the approximately 650 companies to be affected have at least one woman on the board by the first meeting after it is enacted.

• The Senate is expected to approve the legislation by mid-spring 2010.

• The bill won broad support, including from the government, whose own planned gender balance proposal is reported to have not included quotas but to cover more elements of the workforce.

• Business is supporting the current bill as well, or at least not opposing it loudly. Laurence Parisot, head of the national employers group Medef, has endorsed the bill publicly.

• Jean-François Copé, the governing party’s parliamentary leader, based the bill on a 2000 law that requires parity on some election lists. But not for Parliament, where the National Assembly is 82% male.

• Copé also defended the bill by noting how companies with larger numbers of women managers have in general suffered less during the financial crisis. He joked, “A business is not going to go bankrupt because it has as many women as men on the board.”

Sources: Reuters, The Times, Daily Mail