What's this shaking up

There’s no need to look elsewhere. The subject of feminising companies raises a lot of questions: our own and the ones people ask us. Here are some initial answers.

The idea of “female leadership”

Type “female leadership” into the most famous search engine and you’ll probably find a sponsored link from McKinsey & Co entitled “McKinsey Women’s Leadership”. If you click on it, don’t expect to find any hint of this expression within the site. The firm’s SEO manager simply put a post on the query so as to appear at the top of the search results: a sign that the expression is (a little too?) commonly used.

“I can’t tell you how much that annoys me,” says Béatrice Chavanel. “When people tell me on industrial sites that they put more women in such and such a job because it requires more attention to detail, I say: “Do they have a PhD in detail? Is there a training course for that?”” At Microsoft, Florence Douroux-Chatellier had the opportunity to do a “Female Leadership” course: “There were six or seven women, and the first question we thought of was “why use this term?” We did try to find a good reason, but it wasn’t easy,” says the CEO. Caroline Vaquette also makes a face when the expression is used. Pernod Ricard’s Director of Diversity and Inclusion “avoids it” so as not to “convey a stereotype.”

The issue of competence

One hindrance to increasing women’s numbers in companies is the question of skills: Something Karine Lair, Associate Managing Director of Oasys Dirigeants often hears from her clients is “Well, we hire and promote people based on their skills.” She receives “more and more” requests from companies to “mentor” their female leaders. She will say to them, “If they make up only 20% of your Executive Committee, does that mean that only 20% of the women in your company are competent? “Women are the ones who leave secondary school with the most qualifications. If you can’t find any, it’s because you haven’t looked hard enough. In some organisations, there are more women than men at grassroots and middle management level. If there aren’t any at the decision-making level, then there’s a problem.”

Women are the ones who leave secondary school with the most qualifications. If you can’t find any, it’s because you haven’t looked hard enough.

Karine Lair, Oasys Dirigeants

Is it about having children?

“25 years ago, my bosses openly advised me not to say I had children,” says Karine Lair, 52. “Today, I see men leaving meetings at 5 pm to pick up their children from nursery school, while women are sitting around the table. That would have shocked me 10 years ago. It used to be unthinkable. I have brought up my daughter on my own since her birth, and I never dared do that. I had back-up plans; I would leave a meeting to call my mother, a nanny or a neighbour; I’d come back to the table and I certainly wouldn’t say why I’d gone out.” Catherine Petit, CEO of Moët-Hennessy Brazil, agrees that times have changed. When she became head of the group’s Africa zone, she made it a condition to be based in Paris so that she could raise her 14-year-old son as a single mother. Companies are increasingly taking the work-life balance of employees into account. Karine Lair sees this as proof that children were and still are used as a pretext to penalise women. “More and more women don’t have children, but they still meet with discrimination. Even a woman in her fifties has little chance of making it into executive and management committees, even if she has no children and can no longer produce any. So it’s pretty clear: women are really discriminated against because they’re women, not just because they have children.”

Women: a “diversity” like any other?

At first, it’s surprising. Many big companies include the process of feminising their management committees and workforce in their “Diversity and Inclusion” policy. Does this mean that women are seen as… a “diversity”? That said, job interviews show that the growing presence of women brings diversity in more ways than one. It goes hand in hand with newer, more varied management styles; at the same time, managements are fostering initiatives to hire and integrate a wider range of profiles than in the past.

The age of perceptions

“But that’s stuff for the boys!” That’s what Cécile Lefèvre’s daughter’s principal education adviser said when she announced her chosen specialities for the following year: maths, physics and engineering sciences. “Today, she doubts that’s the case. Yes, she really doubts that,” says the deputy CEO of the Groupe Pasteur Mutualité, with a set gaze and a lump in her throat. Her 15-year-old daughter is not the only one to suffer from this common attitude towards women. For instance, they are assumed to find it hard to deal with money, and to have fewer technical skills than men. Some perceptions are hard to combat, and still very much present in companies. Florence Douroux-Chatellier remembers an “experienced female marketing profile” who was offered the post of sales manager. “But the sales director had planned to start her off as a salesperson in charge of demonstrations. In the CEO’s view, “he was perpetuating this culture of a rite of passage.”

Reproduction is genderless

“We hire people who are like us,” says Béatrice Chavanel, explaining the problems encountered in “bringing women on board” when “the top management consists of men.” But is this social reproduction at the head of big companies being undermined by the feminisation of businesses? Karine Lair’s experience provides an answer: “Co-optation is no longer just between men, but between schools and between diasporas from one big firm to another as well.”

With or without men?

“It makes sense to get together with other women.” Karine Lair has decided to stage all-female workshops at Oasys Dirigeants in order to create “safe spaces”. “I’ll give you an example: when we organise a coaching session on image, the women should feel relaxed. We’re not going to talk about lipstick in front of a man; it’s personal. There can be a sense of complicity between women.” So she insists that women should be coached by women so they can express themselves freely and avoid “this feeling of paternalism, of having to learn to become men.” That’s often a prerequisite. When she launched one of the first women’s networks 15 years ago, Delphine Henry, now President of Engie My Power, also felt it important to ensure that “women could talk to each other.” “We needed this kind of solidarity to reassure us that we were not alone,” she says. “That was essential at the beginning.” But “these sessions were soon dubbed Tupperware meetings and I realised that we would only succeed if we did it together, with both men and women.” Cécile Lefèvre made the same point: “Initially, there were only women. And the men were laughing about it. If men aren’t included in these training programmes, if men are educated in this area, it can’t work,” says the deputy CEO of the Groupe Pasteur Mutualité. “If you make it a women-only issue, you create a “them against us” situation,” says Joanne Kennedy, Chief of Staff at Sanofi R&D. “‘We need to get everyone around the table and get things moving,” says Christine Croibier, VP Talent at Adecco, who set up the Adelles network with a gender-balanced approach. “Men are our allies, and we have to help them not to see gender equality as something we impose on them.”