PARIS: Frenchmen will be encouraged to take more parental leave and state firms will have to bring more women onto their boards under plans unveiled yesterday that aim to improve gender equality in a country that trails its developed-world peers.
The draft law, intended to bolster women’s careers and their contribution to the economy at a time of flagging growth, will extend to France’s state firms a quota that requires women to make up 40 percent of private company boards by 2017.
“Inequalities are everywhere, so we have to fight them everywhere,” Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the minister for women’s rights in the Socialist government and architect of the bill, told Reuters before presenting the bill to the cabinet. Agencies
