Earning A Place At The Board Table
“The men say, ‘We try to find women, but there is no pool to choose from, and when we do find a woman who is qualified to sit on the board, she says that it takes too much of her time and that she wouldn’t be good at it.’ I think men don’t even ask the question” Fleur Pellerin
Step It Up excerpt
In 2016, the former French government minister Fleur Pellerin founded Korelya Capital, an investment fund aimed at promoting Korean technology investment in France. When she put together her team, she received five times more resumés from men than from women. The financial sector remains primarily masculine, as does the technology sector — out of seven businesses financed by Korelya, only one was founded by a woman.
From 2010 to 2012, Fleur headed up a “think and do” tank working to promote diversity and equal opportunities. The goal was to count the women and people of non-French origin found on the boards of companies listed on the French stock market index CAC 40. The result was ridiculously low. Out of approximately 500 board members, there were a mere ten or so women. “The men say, ‘We try to find women, but there is no pool to choose from, and when we do find a woman who is qualified to sit on the board, she says that it takes too much of her time and that she wouldn’t be good at it.’ I think men don’t even ask the question,” Fleur said when we interviewed her on March 7, 2018. In 2011, a law was passed in France setting a mandatory quota of 40 percent of the underrepresented gender on boards, and oddly enough, the CAC 40 companies have found that missing pool of women. The penalty for companies that do not respect the quota is especially well designed: Directors’ fees are blocked. It is very effective. This quota system will soon apply to smaller businesses as well. Recently, California passed a law requiring in 2019 at least one woman on boards of directors of publicly traded companies headquartered in the state, a number that will increase by 2021.
Fleur also regretted the lack of female candidates for high-level positions in the French administration when she was minister. “When you are in the government designating the people to lead the central administrations, it is hard to say you’re going to do some affirmative action if there is only one female candidate among several men and she is not convincing. Maybe that is what you should do, maybe you should say to yourself that this candidate may seem less good, but I’ll push for her anyway. But those are necessarily hard decisions to make when you are heading up an administration.”
