gender parity

French culture minister Françoise Nyssen has announced that film productions with a minimum of four women in key professional roles will be eligible to greater financial subsidies than others, in a drive to reach greater gender parity in the industry.

While 61% of public service employees are women, they accounted for just 31% of senior civil service posts, from prefects to ambassadors, attributed in 2014. President François Hollande has made the issue of gender parity in the public sector a major policy plank of his five-year term in office, but the challenge to reach even a semblance of equity remains daunting. Lénaïg Bredoux reports.

Future European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, due to take up his functions this autumn, already faces an immediate problem as he composes his list of 28 European commissioners. For out of the 23 nominations so far officialised, only four are women. That represents five less than the outgoing commission, whose female contingent have now co-signed an open letter to Juncker demanding he find at least ten women. As Mediapart’s Brussels correspondent Ludavic Lamant reports, there is increasing uproar over the issue, notably among members of the European Parliament to who Juncker must submit his final list of commissioners for approval.

A collective of French female journalists have launched a campaign against what they call the “invisibility” of women in the media and the often sexist stereotypes of women presented by the media. Their manifesto, published earlier this week with signatures of support from more than 400 media professionals, calls for tough new measures to guarantee gender parity in the journalistic profession and among pundits invited by the media, as already required by law. Here, Mediapart political correspondent Lénaïg Bredoux, a member of the newly-formed collective, explains why she and her colleagues have had enough of the macho media.