Pour homme, pour femme ?

Rachida Dati, the French Minister for Justice, caused a stir last week (9^th January 2009) when she returned to work just five days after giving birth to her first child.  Whatever the minister’s reasons for foregoing the standard three-month maternity leave period, the truth is that it has been a long and, at times, futile struggle for women hoping to enter the upper echelons of the French political system.

 

Ambitious and media-savvy, Mme Dati no doubt saw an opportunity to heighten her profile and to send a clear message to President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is expected to reshuffle his current crop of ministers in the coming weeks.  However, this is not to underestimate the pressure that inevitably comes with being such a high-ranking female politician: pressure that has led Mme Dati to prioritise attending cabinet meetings over spending time with her new-born daughter.

 

France, it is true, has had a female prime minister in the past (Édith Cresson, 1991-1992), and last year there was a realistic opportunity of Ségolène Royal becoming the country’s first female president.  However, women still remain vastly under-represented in parliament (just 18.5% of members) and the number of women holding ministerial positions has rarely numbered more than a half-a-dozen, and frequently in peripheral departments. 

 

Looking further into the issue of women and  politics in France, a search of these terms in the IBSS database brings up 286 results – of which 117 are actually French-language articles.  Very quickly, it becomes apparent that the articles returned cover three main themes: There are those that offer a brief history of the position of women within the French political system, for example, ‘Fifty years of feminising France’s Fifth Republic’ (Murray, Rainbow, 2008); articles which focus more specifically on Ségolène Royal’s ill-fated bid for the presidency, such as, ‘A French-style primary: the designation of Ségolène Royal by the Socialist Party’ (Dolez, Bernard and Laurent, Annie, 2007); and, most prominently, articles which analyse the effect of France’s gender-parity law of 2000.

 

The gender-parity law was introduced in an attempt to create equality of representation by requiring fifty percent of all French electoral candidates to be women.  Scanning a sample of the abstracts returned from my search, the tone of these articles appears to doubt the law’s success, citing the “competing and contradictory demands” it places on French political parties (‘How parties evaluate compulsory quotas: a study of the implementation of the ‘parity’ law in France’; Murray, Rainbow, 2007) and the adverse effect of “both the electoral system and the attitudes of political parties” (‘Increasing women’s political representation: the limits of constitutional reform’; Freedman, Jane, 2004), which remain as obstacles to equal political representation.

 

This being the case it is even more important to acknowledge the achievement of the few women who have made it to positions of real power within such a male-dominated arena.  Their success is encouraging and inspirational to women in many walks of life.  The French political system may have a long way to go in terms of reaching its stated aims of gender parity of representation but women like Rachida Dati are at the forefront of the effort.  Her decision to return to work so soon after giving birth has divided opinion both in France and across Europe, but it can also be seen as the act of a woman eager to prove that she can succeed and thrive in an environment that for too long has been dominated by men.