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  • L’égalité professionnelle entre les femmes et les hommes by Jacqueline Laufer
  • Dorothée Serges Garcia
Jacqueline Laufer, L’égalité professionnelle entre les femmes et les hommes [Male-female occupational equality], La Découverte, Repères, 2014, Paris, 127 p.

Jacqueline Laufer has written an overview of legislative progress on this issue in France and the difficulties that arise when it comes to actually implementing laws in private- and public-sector companies. Persistent impediments to male-female occupational equality have made it necessary to apply sanctions, positive discrimination and quotas. The book is organized into four substantial parts. The first handles the mixed picture of how labour market inequality was constructed in France, the organizational processes and family relations involved. The second takes up the legal principles that get activated in the battle to obtain occupational equality for women. The third examines the issues and actors involved in the question of occupational equality, i.e., the state, companies, and unions. The fourth describes how occupational equality is being implemented. This book makes a two-fold contribution: while offering a painstaking reconstitution of the socio-historical events that led to establishing a policy of male-female occupational equality in France, now recognized and supported by a legal framework, it also notes that the “glass ceiling” has remained in place and analyses this phenomenon by way of the author’s own empirical studies of both private- and public-sector companies.

Laufer’s work begins with a few figures showing that women are concentrated in employment “niches” that make use of their “natural specificities.” More [End Page 830] women than men work part-time or on fixed-term contracts, and women’s careers are interrupted more frequently and for longer periods than men’s. Consequently, women’s wages are lower, even in the civil service. The “glass ceiling” is to be found in all occupations. The corollary to constructing differences between men and women is a devaluing of women’s work, and this in turn results in lasting stereotypes linking women to their role as mothers, whereas the prestigious models are usually male and involve mobility, personal investment in work, and availability. These stereotypes are reinforced by social and family policy.

The author stresses the legal and legislative framework developed in France to ensure equal employment opportunity; she calls for “effective corrective mechanisms” be put in place at the EU and international levels to reduce social inequalities. The French legal framework encompasses laws on equal rights and protection for working women (maternity leave and protection for women and mothers, equal treatment, day/night work, part-time work, positive discrimination, quotas, etc.). Laufer then examines what she calls France’s “state feminism,” the initial foundations of which were laid in the late 1970s. All the different labour actors–the state, companies, unions–have been engaged in promoting women’s rights in the public and private spheres. The state has been represented by several structures over time: the Comité du Travail Féminin (CTF, committee on working women), which worked to ensure male/female wage equality and had considerable impact; the central government department for women’s rights (SDF), which focuses on occupational training for women as a means of attaining the goal of employment equality; and the Conseil Supérieur de l’Egalité Professionnelle (CSEP, higher council for occupational equality), an institution that includes unions and employers. She criticizes these institutions for not drawing more fully on contributions from feminist and other associations. Indeed, it was not until 2001, when the occupational equality law was passed, that the state first took up demands addressed to employers. This in turn led to the establishment of commissions for assessing how best to achieve occupational equality. In 1995, the Observatoire de la Parité (parity watch) was set up, later renamed Haut Conseil à l’Egalité (high council for equality), with the task of assessing and reducing occupational inequalities. Lastly, in 2013, the state set up the Haut Conseil à l’Egalité entre les Femmes et les Hommes (HCEFH, high council for equality between women and men), the idea being to introduce this objective into public policy. The author notes that at first this created tensions and...

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