Women and Work
WOMEN AND WORK
By Dominique Méda
Dominique Méda heads the Research Unit in the Research and Statistical Information Directorate (Direction de l’animation de la recherche, des etudes et des statistiques) of the Ministry for Employment and Solidarity. A social policy specialist, she is the author of "Le temps des femmes, pour un nouveau partage des rôles", Flammarion, 2001.The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
A number of historical studies show that French women have always worked: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, women accounted for slightly over a third of the total labour force, i.e. 4.5 million women out of 12.9 million. By 1911, 36% of the labor force were female and half of all women of working age worked. After a marked decline between 1920 and 1945, female employment resumed and really ‘took off’ from the 1960s onwards. From then on, there was real revolution - women were not only working in ever greater numbers, but above all their career patterns changed: whereas before, women who worked outside the home had mostly been spinsters and those who were married stopped working when they had children, continuous employment became the dominant model for the women born in the 1950s who joined the labour market in the 1970s. French society does not appear to have got the full measure of this silent revolution, even though a number of official reports and reforms currently under way show things are changing.
Radical transformation in the employment norm for women
To begin with, there are two essential points: the inexorable growth in female employment over the last thirty years and the tremendous changes in women’s levels of education and training.
Female employment suddenly accelerated at the end of the 1960s: in 1968, the employment rate for women of working age had still not returned to the 1911 level. But between 1968 and 1975 women accounted for three quarters of the growth in the size of the workforce (1 million out of 1.4 million). It was in 1965 that women - until then, under the French Civil Code, the husband had been the ruler of the household - acquired full legal personality, enabling them to practise the profession or trade of their choice without their husbands’ consent and, if unemployed, to claim the same benefits. In 2000, the employment rate for women of working age was 48% compared with 62% for men. But it is clearly the employment rate for women aged 25 to 49 years which is important because this is the figure which both increased the most and - because of the unprecedented growth in the employment of married women and mothers - explains the general changes in female employment: this was 80% in 2000.
In other words, the main point is that women now no longer stop working when they have children: the majority work, even those with three children. This is the essential fact, even though the existence of children and influence of certain public policies, such as the parental education allowance (1), can reduce the female employment rate under certain economic circumstances: in 2000, the employment rates for women aged 25 to 49 years, broken down by their family situation were as follows:
 Single: 87.7
Married:
0 children: 86.6
1 child (under 16): 85.2
2 children (under 16): 75
More than 2 children (under 16): 51.1
Total: 80.6
Source: Hommes et femmes face à l’emploi, Les Dossiers Thématiques de la DARES, INSEE, Liaisons sociales, Dares, No. 17, 2000
The other major change is in women’s education. This too is tantamount to a revolution. In spite of the Falloux Act, which in 1850 made it obligatory for communes [lowest tier of local government in France] with more than 800 inhabitants to open and maintain schools for girls, in spite of the introduction of female secondary education, the Front populaire continued to specify, in their 1938 Syllabus Directions for example, that "girls shall do their best to learn the craft of housewife and mother…Practical work must always be educational. It ought not under any circumstances be intended as special learning for a specific occupation". It was 1963 before co-education was accepted as the norm in secondary schools.
Today, young women leave the school system with more qualifications than young men. First of all, beginning with those born after 1950, the number of girls attaining the baccalauréat [school leaving examination taken in the final year at a lycée] began regularly to outstrip that of boys. And then, starting with those born after 1955, there also began to be more girls than boys successfully completing their higher education. For the generations born in 1970, now thirty, the proportion of those with a qualification equal to, or higher than a master’s degree is now the same for men and women.
Girls today study longer and do better in examinations: the rate of female success in the baccalauréat is higher than that of boys (81.2% compared with 76.5% in 1998). They continue their studies longer than boys and fewer of them repeat a year. Today there are 120 girls for every 100 boys in higher education. During the 1998-1999 academic year, women accounted for 56.4% of students in the first "cycle" [first two years] at university, 58% of students in the second "cycle" [third and fourth years] and 50% of those in the third "cycle" [one-year + course open only to selected postgraduate students]. "When they leave higher education", says the Centre for research on employment and skills (CEREQ), "women and men enter the same segments of the labour market and access the same types of occupation. There are still differences between the sexes but these are slight. For these young graduates, the ways in which girls and boys join the labour market are more alike than different."
Young women graduates are in fact a bit less likely to be unemployed than young men. In March 1998, 25% of working women had an academic qualification above the baccalauréat compared with 20% of men. Also in March 1998, full-time female employees were on average more academically qualified than their male colleagues: indeed, 44% of women compared with 30% of men had academic qualifications at least equal to the baccalauréat.
This is a tremendous revolution: here is an area where the very strong inequalities between men and women have been completely reversed. In a society which nowadays claims to be knowledge-based, the assets women have, their "stock of human capital", and thus of knowledge and skills, is greater than that of men. Women are not regarded as workers on the same level as men
Since the women who work, and constantly by their actions manifest their determination to work, generally have a "human capital" higher than that of men, their situation ought to be at least as good as that of men. Not so.
Women over-represented in the unemployment figures
Since the end of the 1960s, and in spite of recent improvements, women, whatever their age and level of training, have a higher unemployment rate than men. In March 2000, the overall unemployment rate was 10%, but that for women was 11.9% and for men, 8.5%. A difference of 5 percentage points persists between the unemployment rate of young women compared with young men. Whilst the fact that male heads of families with one or two children have a lower unemployment rate of two or three percentage points, the reverse is true for women. Having one or two children appears to increase their probability of being unemployed by one or two percentage points and having three or more, by five points…
Women over-represented in certain forms of employment
Women are employed more frequently than men in certain forms of employment: fixed term contracts, temporary work, traineeships and assisted contracts [employment contracts for which employers receive substantial State aid]. They also make up the big battalions of part-time jobs, something that to a large extent they feel they must "put up with". Indeed, the number of part-time jobs has increased considerably in France, especially since 1993 when incentives were introduced (reductions in employers’ social contributions, etc.). From being an instrument enabling family life to be reconciled with working life - what it used to be - which was chosen mainly by women working in the civil and local government service or by female executives, part-time working has become a tool for increasing flexibility which companies, especially in mass marketing, have abused. Part-time working has been converted by companies into a tool for adjusting their workforce to consumer demand. 17% of jobs in France are now part-time, and 85% of these are held by women. In 1998, almost one third of female employees had part-time jobs. This increase in part-time working suffered by women (40% of them said in 1998 that they wanted to work more) explains to a large degree the over-representation of women in low- or very low-paid jobs. In 1998, 85% of female employees received the lowest pay and only 27% were in the category of highest-paid employees. In 1997, 80% of employees earning less than EUR 556 a month were women.
Women’s promotion prospects not the same as men
Immediately after graduating, young women with qualifications join the labour market more or less as young men do. But then things rapidly go downhill: eight years after entering the labour market, significant differences are observed between the career patterns of women and men. After ten years in a career, someone in work with a general baccalauréat [academic rather than vocational subjects] has a 17% chance of occupying a managerial position if he is a man, and an 8% chance if she is a woman. Today, women account for a little over one third of executives and people in "professional etc. occupations". But they continue to hit the "glass ceiling", i.e. they hit a sort of invisible barrier which stops them reaching the highest echelons resulting in the fact that in big firms the number of women senior executives or company board members is pathetically small and bears no relation to what their academic achievements would lead them to expect. In the top five thousand French companies, women account for only 7% of top executives.
Women’s jobs concentrated in certain sectors
Here there is a clear segregation between the jobs primarily done by women and those done mainly by men: of the thirty-one categories identified by the French National Institute for Economic and Statistical Information (INSEE), six socioprofessional categories cover 61% of the jobs women do. They are employed in the civil and local government service, in companies, in shops, as staff providing services to individuals, as primary school teachers and in the professions supplementary to medicine (radiographers, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, etc.). 71% of women work in the service sector, only 47% of men do, but industry pays better than the service sector; almost half of the men are manual workers, and half the women have non-manual jobs. Almost 30% of full-time female employees have civil service or local government jobs as opposed to 17% of men. This is partly due to the careers guidance girls receive at school: they still turn in larger numbers to the low-skill lower-paid service sector than to the technology sectors which are more lucrative. Despite the remarkable progress of girls’ education, there is still substantial segregation on the job front. When she registers with the National Employment Agency (ANPE), one woman in ten finds herself registered for ten occupations in only three employment sectors. So the stereotypes are very strong and start at a very early age.
Women’s pay levels systematically below those of men
At every level of academic qualification, men are paid more than women; if pay depended only on academic qualifications, women would on average be better paid than men. And yet there are big differences in pay: according to the most often quoted statistic, women earn on average 25% less than men. But the fact that women are more often part-time workers than men, work in lower-paid sectors than men and have skills that are less valued than those of men must be taken into account. "All things being equal", the pay gap between men and women is 7%, which is the unexplained residual difference which cannot be attributed to any other cause, apart from belonging to one sex or the other.
Burden of family and household responsibilities
Society has clearly not adjusted to this silent revolution constituted by women’s determination to enter the labour market en masse and to succeed there as well as men. The opinion polls published on the subject in recent years reveal that women are increasingly unwilling to accept the inequality meted out to them in their working lives. But understanding where the inequality comes from is another matter. Clearly, although measures were introduced in the 1970s allowing women to choose for themselves as far as contraception and abortion are concerned (Neuwirth and Veil Acts), and in the 1980s with regard to equality of employment (1983 Roudy Act), insufficient efforts have been made to consider and deal with the intersection of work and family. A large proportion of the inequalities at work are explained by the fact that women are almost exclusively responsible for household and family tasks, something recently confirmed by several surveys and studies.
The first such poll, on men and women’s daily schedules carried out by INSEE in 1998-9, showed that women still do 80% of the hard core of domestic chores, i.e. that whilst the (wage or salary earning) husband spends an average of one and a quarter hours on domestic work per day, the wife spends an average four and a half hours. This "division of labour" has remained relatively stable for twenty years. But the most important finding is that the arrival of a child very considerably upsets the balance the couple had previously established between the amount of time they each spend at work and at home, with women reducing the former as the number of small children in the family goes up, whereas, if anything, men work longer hours. Another survey recently showed that "parental time", devoted to activities for or with the children and estimated to be around 39 hours a week, was also very badly divided between the parents, with women investing twice as much time as men (just over 25 hours a week compared to just over 12 hours for men). The burden of family and household tasks thus weighs heavily on the working lives of women when it does not cause them simply to stop working altogether.
Another of the obstacles to the better integration of women into the world of work is the present inadequacy of childcare facilities: in 1998, of 2.2 million children aged 0-3 years, 250,000 had a nursery school place and, of the other 1,950,000, 50% were looked after at home by one of the two parents, 13% in a childminder’s home, 9% in a crèche, 2% at home thanks to the grant paid to a working parent (parents) of a child under three for the employment of a childminder at home, and 26% by other more informal arrangements involving relatives or neighbours, etc. At the last family conference, in June 2000, a plan was presented to increase the number of childminder and crèche places by 40,000, at a cost of EUR 0.46 billion.
As for companies, or more generally employers’ organizations, in both the public and private sectors, they have not taken sufficient account of the massive entry of women into the labour market since the 1970s and have not revised their working hours to allow both members of a couple - and the majority of couples now both go out to work - to devote as much time to their working lives as they do to their family and domestic activities. The legislation to reduce working hours ("Aubry" Acts of 13 June 1998 and 19 January 2000) was not originally brought in to promote equality of employment between the sexes, even though there has been an improvement on that score as a result of some of the negotiations.
Reforms currently under way
Even though it did not have a direct impact on the employment situation of women and the sharing of tasks within couples, the Act of 3 May 2000 instituting parity between men and women in the various elections has clearly helped boost a revival of interest in the issues of inequality between men and women and was accompanied by the commissioning of public reports which produced some compelling findings: reports to the Prime Minister by Catherine Génisson on the need for more occupational desegregation in order to achieve greater equality between men and women, by Anne-Marie Colmou on moving towards male-female equality in senior civil and local government service management, and, more recently, Michèle Cotta’s report for the Economic and Social Council on the role of women in decision-making. In addition to the measures mentioned earlier concerning childcare, in March 2001 the Prime Minister issued an administrative circulaire [these have the status of regulations if they include instructions to civil servants] enjoining all French ministries to introduce equality programmes and two Bills are under discussion, one on equality of employment for men and women and the other on combating discrimination.
The purpose of the first Bill is to introduce a requirement to negotiate specifically on equality of employment at company and sectoral level, thus making obligatory what used to be just an option for the employer and trade union and employer organizations under the Act of 13 July 1983 (Roudy Act). The Bill also provides for the definition by decree of the indicators needed to analyse a company’s position with regard to equality of employment. The goal of the second Bill is to transpose into French law the European Directive of 15 December 1997 on the burden of proof in cases of sexual discrimination. This extends application of the procedural arrangements of the Directive to all cases of discrimination in the workplace. The text envisages authorizing trade union organizations to take any legal action to combat discrimination in recruitment, training, posting, classification, qualifications, promotion, transfer, sanction and dismissal. These two Bills thus seek to make equality between men and women in the workplace a major issue in the social dialogue.
France still has to find the measures which will achieve real equality in the home at the same time as equality in the workplace and political parity, the first being a prerequisite for the last two. Although introducing specific paternity leave - such as exists in Sweden - could help considerably, it will not be enough. Incentives and publicity campaigns will clearly have to be devised to bring about a profound change in attitudes.
NOTE (1): The Parental Education Allowance (APE) was introduced in 1985 for women with three children who had been gainfully employed for at least two years out of the thirty months preceding the child’s birth in order to compensate for loss or reduction of parental income from paid employment. In 1994, the APE was broadened to include women with a second child and the number of beneficiaries increased considerably./.
Source : Images de la France (SIG)
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