In the fight for progress, one might believe that the decision by the Paris mayor to award a majority of jobs to women might be a good thing. But instead, the French national government has penalized the mayor for not hiring enough…men.
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo announced the city had been fined €90,000 by the French Ministry of Civil Service (Ministre de la Fonction publique) because she had awarded top posts to 11 women and just 5 men.
Hidalgo was the first woman elected mayor of Paris in 2014 and was just re-elected to a second term this past summer. On Twitter, Hidalgo mocked the decision and promised that she and her top officials would go personally to “take this check to the Ministry of Civil Service.”
She also called the fine “absurd, unfair, irresponsible and dangerous,” during a city council meeting this week, according to RTL. “What is beautiful about the bureaucracy is that it has absolutely no knowledge of discernment and therefore it dares everything.”
Hidalgo added: “We must promote women with determination because the backwardness in France is still very great. We must therefore accelerate the tempo and appoint more women than men.”
The fine relates to her staff choices from 2018. A law passed in 2019 relaxed the rules a bit, allowing organizations to have a slight tilt either toward men or women at certain levels as long as it didn’t lead overall to a gender imbalance. Under the new rules, Paris would not have been fined.
Like many countries, France continues to struggle with gender discrimination, with women continuing to lag men in many economic measures such as pay. A new law that went into effect this year requires companies to collect and share data related to hiring practices and gender statistics.
The first index published earlier this year showed that women in France are paid 25% less than men across all jobs, and 9% for jobs where the position and age are the same. Overall, 17% of companies with more than 250 employees were placed on “red alert” in September 2019 for possibly violating France’s equal pay for equal work rules.
