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Half of all directors to be female under French plan
Sarkozy’s party presents radical bill to bring gender equality to French business
President Nicolas Sarkozy and his UMP party seem determined to shake up the business world on both sides of the Channel. In the same week that the French president has been baiting the City of London over the appointment of a Frenchman, Michel Barnier, to oversee financial services regulation on behalf of the EU, his centre-right UMP is proposing a radical plan to impose gender equality on French corporations.
All companies listed on the Paris stock exchange will have to ensure that 50 per cent of their board members are made up of women by the year 2015, if the bill submitted to the French parliament passes into law. It will be debated in the French parliament in the new year.
The implementation would be gradual - 20 per cent of seats to be female within 18 months, 40 per cent within four years, and the magical 50-50 rached within six years.
Such quotas are traditionally anathema to business leaders but a surprising number of French corporate figures seem to agree with the UMP that this is the only way to modernise the last bastion of the male elite in France.
Jean-François Cope, president of the UMP, said the quota would give a "much-needed electro-shock" to French boardrooms. Even Daniel Lebegue, president of the French Institute of directors, said it was the best way to encourage progress. A similar plan has worked in Norway where quotas have led to 40 per cent of directorships going to women.
Despite all this positive reaction, there are still those who like to remind Sarkozy that his own plan to boost the chances of women in politics has come unstuck. He boldly appointed seven women to his 15-member cabinet when he came to power in 2007: three of them have already been replaced.
Meanwhile in London, the row over Michel Barnier's appointment and Sarkozy's implied threat to impose a new layer of EU regulations on the City, continues to sizzle.
Angela Knight - who didn't need a quota to become chief of the British Bankers' Association - said yesterday: "President Sarkozy must surely recognise that he has undermined the EU with his statements and put a question mark over the impartiality of his nominated commissioner that will not be easily dispelled."
As The First Post reported yesterday, Sarkozy is convinced that the "free-wheeling Anglo-Saxon" financial model was responsible for the global economic downturn, and that Barnier's appointment is a chance to "clamp down on the City" with some French-style financial discipline.
Not if Knight has her way. "If anyone in the European project thinks for a minute that they are capable of subverting the years of effort it took us to make the UK the world's financial centre, they are sadly mistaken," she said. ·
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More of the socially engineered madness that occurs when you allow feminism to run rampant and not only unchallenged but aided all the way by cowardly males who already have what they want, so think nothing of defecating over other males further down the pecking order. This isn't equality, it's sex discrimination and would the same man hating women who make these divisive and unjust demands do the same for men? They would laugh in men's faces and call them idiots and rightly so. This will end in even greater financial calamity and division and I would go as far as to suggest violent opposition eventually, because these man bashing women will never stop demanding until they have everything and still they would complain. If women can't make headway under their own steam, it isn't because of discrimination, it's because they can't cut it. Enough is enough.
Sarkozy's clearly off his head - or under pressure from his wife or some group of women or something. But it all makes for good clean fun - until the hens come home to roost on him and the sh*t descends upon him - when the French business community - and French society in general - subverts him. The French seem able to accept a monarchy/emperor/political dictator periodically (the Monarchy, Napoleon, De Gaulle (at least he knew when to quit)) but then come to their senses. How long this time?