Gender inequality analysis and comparison within Carrefour, Orange and Airbus

The purpose of our Project was to evaluate if gender inequality is handled in a better way in powerful elite French companies than in most of other firms, and to highlight some possible improvements regarding specific areas.

Hence, I decided to collect data from three different companies, two being French (meaning Orange and Carrefour), compared with Airbus, European leader firm in the Aviation industry, and second world leader. In order to have the most recent, relevant and consistent information, all collected data is from 2016.

Overall, we can see through each company's Corporate Social Responsibility Annual Report that they are all concerned about Gender Equality. Indeed, they all provide information and statistics with regards to its female employees' activity, place and development within the company. It is worth pointing out some differences between them though.

First, metrics collected was aimed to highlight three main aspects that are the following: finding the percentage of management positions filled by women within the company, the percentage of female employees within the company, and whether the CEO is a man of a woman.

Hence, Carrefour's 2016 Registration Document shows that 39.20% of management positions were filled by women in 2016, against 27.30% in Orange and 11.00% in Airbus. This represents an issue as these results are actually very low. Next, Carrefour's women employees represents more than a half of its total number of employees (exactly 57.5%) which is good, whereas Orange's women employees represent only 36.1% of the company's total workforce. Airbus is significantly behind, with only 17% of women in its workforce. Lastly, the last metric to collect was whether the CEO is a male or a female, and all companies are currently headed by men.

Those result definitely show that there is still a long way to go in order for companies to fight against gender inequality. But it is worth mentioning that they effectively understood that issue and therefore, are implementing improvement strategies to lessen gender inequalities.

To illustrate this, Carrefour shows its involvement regarding women professional development by offering a Women Leader Program, aimed to make sure that women play a full and effective role in the workplace and have a full access to all management functions. On the other hand, Orange currently monitors workplace gender equality by implementing a rule which states that 35% of recruitment has to be women. The company also wants to increase the proportion of women in management bodies, with the objective being: 35% of management positions will have to be filled by female workers in 2020. Lastly, Airbus' commitment to empowering women and girls and advancing women in the workplace can be seen through equal employment opportunities, the company is determined to increase the number of women it recruits to 30%.

Even if we can see some efforts made by companies in terms of gender equality improvements, there are still some negative points shown in their Registration Documents. For instance, there was a decrease in the percentage of female employees within the Carrefour company between 2015 and 2016, as they represented 57.6% of the total workforce in 2015, against 57.5% in 2016; whereas Carrefour's staff slightly increased by 0.8% between these dates. Besides, all CEOs are men and as it is not discussed in the reports, this seems to be maintained as it is in the future. Lastly, the biggest issue concerns Airbus, still lacking of female employees and female managers since years ago. This is maybe due to the fact that this company is part of the Aviation industry, which tends to interest more male engineers and technicians than female ones. Lastly, all the three companies studied did not give any information regarding their male-to-female remuneration basic ratio.

In conclusion, we can say that companies are more and more concerned by gender inequality, as they currently implement strategies as well as objectives in order to handle it properly. Furthermore, this analysis has provided me reasons to think that powerful French companies such as Orange and Carrefour tend to handle gender inequality better than European companies such as Airbus, but we must take into account that they are not part of the same industry. As a result, it could be interesting and maybe more relevant to create another Research Question, which collects the same information, but from companies within the same industry.

Pauline BENNETOT