Global Policy Forum

By Jon Henley

Paris - On the eve of International Women's Day and a month after approving a law to boost sexual equality in politics, French MPs yesterday began debating new legislation that would force companies to pay women and men the same wage for the same job. "Discrimination against women in terms of recruitment, salaries and access to training and promotion has far from disappeared," said the Socialist MP Catherine Génisson, who proposed the bill. "This is a modest start to a very necessary process in France."

The "professional parity" bill, likely to become law next year, follows a "political parity" law passed in February, which threatened cuts in state funding for any party fielding more men than women in local, regional, general or European elections.

According to a report presented by Ms Génisson to the prime minister, Lionel Jospin, last year, women are woefully under-represented in the upper echelons of business and are almost invariably paid less than their male colleagues. The report revealed that the average pay gap between women and men for the same job is 27%. It also showed that only 7% of managers in France's top 5,000 companies are women, while 80% of part-time workers are women, as are nearly 90% of workers on less than £6,000 a year.

The bill will force companies and trade unions - on pain of stiff penalties - to hold annual negotiations on sexual equality in the workplace, and to submit progress reports.

French women got the vote only in 1944, decades after many other European countries, and today occupy only 10.4% of seats in the 577-member National Assembly - the worst record in any EU country except Greece.

Women occupy just 10% of top civil service jobs, cannot boast a single senior executive among France's top 200 companies, and are still suffering the legacy of the 19th century Napoleonic code that gave husbands sweeping powers over their wives.

But not all women were pleased with the proposed bill. "Basically, it's not necessary," said Nicole Catala of the opposition RPR party, which has already said it will abstain from the eventual vote. "Existing labour legislation covers most of the ground."

The employers' federation, Medef, said it agreed with the principle, but did not see why France wanted to legislate on the issue when a wide-ranging European directive was being prepared in Brussels. "This is ideological point-scoring," a Medef spokesman said.

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