France – Record number of women in Hollande’s cabinet

EuroMediter is glad to announce there’s gender parity in the French government. Nicolas Sarkozy promised a parity government in 2007, but failed to deliver. Five years later, newly elected president François Hollande has just done it. For the first time, France boasts as many women as men in its 34-member cabinet. Gender equality can be done after all. And to live these moments in Cannes, during the 65th Cannes film festival where no women directors feature among the 22 film-makers whose films have been selected in competition, somehow highlights Hollande’s achievement. In French boardrooms, only 15% of executives in large French companies are women – despite a new law setting a quota for 40% by 2017. It was in this context that Hollande appointed a government containing equal numbers of women and men for the first time in France – a country that only gave women the vote in 1945. It is not a European first – the Spanish Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had equal numbers of men and women in his first cabinet in 2004 and more women than men in his second. But France’s new cabinet is well above the European average of 26% women.

Source: Press Europe.