We have just celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Copé-Zimmermann law requiring a minimum of 40% of representatives of both genders on the boards of directors of large companies.

It is an understatement to say that this law has been a great success : firstly, its objectives were achieved even before the initially planned deadline, they are even slightly exceeded today (44% of women on the CAC boards and 46% on those of the SBF 120);  secondly, it has inspired other countries (Spain copied it in 2018, the Netherlands in 2019, Germany, which currently has only 13% of women on boards, is expected to pass a similar law at the beginning of 2021) and a project to generalise it to the whole of Europe is still under discussion.

But the " feminization " of boards of directors has not sufficiently " trickled down " into the executive committees and other management bodies of companies. Today, in France, even if some companies show almost perfect parity, the average rate of women in executive committees stagnates at 17.49%.

And this is a real problem because if the boards, whose members are appointed by the shareholders' meeting and whose role is, in addition to appointing the director/general manager, to define the organization's strategy, they are not actors of the " heart of the reactor ", grappling with the business and the decisions that must be taken to activate the strategy, in direct connection with the managerial lines that implement actions in the field. That's the job of the Executive Committee.

So, the debate is now on the table : since the Copé-Zimmermann law has not produced a cascade effect to increase gender diversity in senior management, should it be duplicated specifically for executive committees ?

The editorial staff of the EVE web magazine has identified and analysed the arguments involved in this current debate.

Why is it " easier " to achieve parity in the boards of directors than in the executive committees ?

While companies' efforts to achieve parity on boards of directors are to be commended , it should be noted that " finding women " to take on board positions is not such a big headache.

Firstly, from a statistical point of view, we are talking about a fairly small population: in total, the boards of directors covered by the Copé-Zimmermann law represent between 3000 and 4000 mandates to be distributed...

… Knowing that you can cumulate : you can be a director of several organizations in different sectors, and possibly far from those in which you have experience. As a result, in order to reach 40% of women on the boards of large companies, it was actually necessary to identify, according to our calculations, between 400 and 600 women in a position to take tokens.

The volume is not of the same order for the Executive Committees, where it is not possible to cumulate. So if you have to distribute 40% of the management positions to women out of a total that can be estimated, for a perimeter equivalent to that of the Copé Zimmermann law, between 7000 and 10000 people, you will have to find between 3000 and 4000 women in a position to enter the CODIR and willing to make their place.

Another problem : you don't enter a board of directors or an executive committee at the same stage of your professional life or for the same reasons. To illustrate this point simply, let's look at the average age of directors : 59 years old for the CAC40 and the SBF 120, of which less than 10% are in their forties (it should be noted that this average age has decreased at the same time as the Copé-Zimmermann law has been implemented). And now, the average age of COMEX members: 53 years old, of which nearly 20% are in their forties.

This led a manager whose name we will not mention to say this sentence that sums up the whole problem : " To find a 55-60 year old director, whose children are grown, is to make her a flattering proposal..." Finding a 45-year-old leader who sometimes still has young children means risking being told "I'd love to join the Executive Committee, but now it's not really the time for me to take on new challenges. Wait, boss, don't move, there's the school calling me." »

In other words, in the population targeted by the desire to feminize the Executive Committees, there is a plethora of qualified women, who have led a very good professional career even if it means delaying the time of their maternity, which are more often in dual-career couples and do not necessarily escape the differences in the sharing of domestic and family responsibilities and the inequalities in the face of the mental load. We will have to be convincing to get them to enter the Executive Committees... Or change the rules of the game so that they can be projected more easily !

And on the question of principle, do quotas for women on executive committees creak more than quotas on board boards?

Once the question of the difficulty of " finding " women to take a place on executive committees and executive committees has been raised, do we encounter more " principled " resistance in organizations when it comes to better balancing these bodies than when it comes to board meetings ?

Yes. For two reasons that come together : the first is that the legitimacy of a member of the Executive Committee is fundamentally based on the demonstration of competence, level of expertise, knowledge of the sector, the company and its ecosystem; The second is that it is a form of culmination in an ambitious career, marking the passage to the highest decision-making level after having successfully completed the stages of the journey as it is designed.

With the prospect of quotas in the Executive Committees, the question of legitimacy and merit (which the debates on parity in politics have left us with the memory that she particularly likes to invite herself to the debate table when it comes to increasing the share of women) is therefore coming back in force, at the same time as a tight competition is being played out for a very small number of places in which the Insiders are not necessarily always happy to see new ones arrive – in this case, new challengers.

As a result, the idea returns, with concern and/or bitterness, that the quotas for women in the Executive Committees are an unfair " positive discrimination" that is contrary to the rules of competition as they are known and mastered by the participants already positioned. All the rhetoric around quotas parades in the aftermath : loss of opportunity for men, humiliation for women (although there are more of them today to no longer reject the term " female quota " so strongly), change in the rules of the game during the game (anyone who has ever played Monopoly knows how irritating it is!) or even a drop in the expected level (and we bring out, without fear of mixing peas and carrots, certain studies conducted in the 1990s on the effects of minority quotas on American university campuses)...

But then, who is in favour, why and under what conditions of a quota system in the Executive Committees ?

Despite the tensions expressed at the prospect of seeing the Copé-Zimmermann system transposed to the level of the Executive Committees, some cling to the idea, including the current Minister of the Economy and Finance and theMinister of Equality and Diversity, the High Council for Equality between Women and Men,  Tech figures who are sorry to see the patterns of the past reproduced in the new economy, academics and consultants who work on the correlation between gender diversity and performance... And then,4.6% of the French, according to a recent YouGov poll.

Two main arguments are put forward :

• the need to accelerate professional equality in all spheres of the economy and at all levels of companies (so as not to wait another 2 or 3 centuries for the time of a change in mentalities to perhaps – or not – do its work ;

• the need, for the ambition of all women to develop, from childhood and the beginning of their careers, to have diversified role models and to project themselves into a future where they would no longer be an " exception " or a " rarity " if they were to reach the top of the organization.

This argument takes the gamble not of trickle-down, as the Copé-Zimermann law had implicitly done, but of fertile trivialization. This dynamic has proven its worth with the generalization of women's work, for example : it was when they saw their mothers working that girls naturally envisaged from childhood that they too would have a job and would achieve professional fulfilment. The trivialized reality that is easily observed is sometimes worth all the great speeches.

Okay, but then, if we start with quotas in the Executive Committees, what modalities should be adopted? Insofar as entry into the Executive Committee is readily done by internal promotion, the sectors with the least feminized women are worried about the difficulties they will have in finding enough women within their companies to reach a target of 40%. The employers' organisations therefore defend the idea of representative ratios: the gender diversity rate would therefore be set on a company-by-company basis or by sectoral agreement according to the share of women in the overall workforce.

A solution which, under its apparent common sense, is on the contrary perceived by experts, such as Michel Ferrary, as a contradiction : every time in order not to move forward (too quickly), the argument of pools suffering from the scarcity of women is invoked, the principle of non-mixing is re-anchored in certain industries. The logic of the quota is not an end in itself : it is a method that requires us to give ourselves the means to achieve the objective. Therefore, the company that denies that it cannot place as many women on its Executive Committee as the law would require it to do must work to diversify its recruitment and enrich its pools by ensuring the continuous promotion of employees of both genders throughout their careers.

As this is not done in a day, but should not be sent back to the basement of the organizations' agenda, the modalities of the quota system in the Executive Committees would be oriented towards a tiered system: 20% by the end of 2022 (easily achievable when we are already at 17% on average) and 40% by 2024. To be continued.