The Guardian

Paris, May 11:

The French national assembly launched a campaign yesterday to raise pay for women, who despite laws dating back to the early 1970s still earn on average 25 per cent less than their male counterparts.

“This gulf is unacceptable morally and it is unacceptable economically,” the state secretary for equality, Nicole Ameline, told parliament and her 24 fellow European women’s rights ministers, who were invited for the occasion.

Ameline said her bill, which aims to achieve wage parity within five years, was ‘modern’ in that it would rely on cooperation with employers rather than coercion. Critics said it was toothless, and did not address the real issues of low pay for women such as part-time working.

France - whose president, Jacques Chirac, once said that his ideal woman was one who “served the men at table, never sat down with them, and never spoke” — first defined equal pay for equal work as a basic principle in an amendment to the labour law in 1972.

In 1983 the women’s minister, Yvette Roudy, passed a law obliging all companies with more than 50 employees to carry out a comparative salary survey between men and women. Fifteen years later a government study found less than half France’s businesses were complying.

Then in 2001 another MP, Catherine Genisson, introduced a bill threatening company bosses who failed to carry out the salary survey, or to start gender-specific negotiations as a result of it, with fines of Euros 3,750 and up to a year in jail. Another study last year found that 72 per cent of French companies had not held a single round of talks to address differences between men’s and women’s pay.

Today women make up 57 per cent of the French workforce, compared with 30 per cent in the 1960s, but only 14 per cent of company bosses and 35 per cent of managers. However, more than 75 per cent of part-time workers are women, as are nearly 90 per cent of the 3.4 million workers in France earning less than 9,000 euros a year.

The government’s move follows a law passed four years ago aimed at boosting women’s presence in political life by forcing parties to field an equal number of men and women candidates in every election. French women got the vote only in 1944, years after many European countries, and now occupy just 12 per cent of seats in the national assembly - the lowest in western Europe bar Italy and Greece.

In part, the relatively lowly place of women in political and business life is a legacy of the 19th century Napoleonic legal code, drawn up by a man who once said that women “should belong to men as trees belong to their gardeners”. It gave husbands sweeping powers over their wives that lasted well into the 20th century.

Ameline’s bill contains possible financial penalties for companies that fail to evaluate salary differences, but only after a three-year grace period.

Genisson said the new law was “very disappointing indeed. Until we tackle the immense problem of part-time workers — and today two out of every three women in work are employed on part-time or temporary contracts — we will see no real improvement in salary levels.”

The new text also aims to ensure that women who return to work after maternity leave or a more extended absence are not unfairly treated, obliging their employers to give them a pay rise equivalent to the average increase awarded in the company during their absence.