Gender balance: a year of progress
Conference on equality between men and women at the LL Network annual day, June 2019 (Paris, France)
With over 64% female employees in 2019, the Lagardère group’s two major activities operate in professional environments with a high proportion of women. This predominance of women can also be seen at management level, with women making up 55% of managers and a very high percentage of executive managers (44% in 2019 compared with 42% in 2018).
These impressive results do not exempt the Lagardère group from its responsibilities in terms of equality and in 2019 it continued with its commitment in four main areas.
Helping women to progress in their career. Allowing women to access positions of responsibility is one of the challenges facing the Group and is reflected by the promotion of a number of women within the corporate division and business divisions in 2019. Overall, the breakdown of promotions between women and men was in favour of women (62% of promotions), as was also the case for pay rises, 64% of which were awarded to women in 2019.
Transparency in terms of equal pay. Although the matter of equal pay is a must in all equality agreements within the Group, the divisions have also published – in accordance with the law for the freedom to choose your professional future – the equal pay index, based on five criteria. The first companies concerned within Lagardère Publishing and Lagardère Travel Retail obtained scores of 89 and 86 respectively out of 100 on average.
Fighting sexism. 2019 saw the implementation of the first commitments made on signing the #StOpE charter against so-called ordinary sexism in business in December 2018. The initial measures taken concerned training HR teams and raising employee awareness.
Development of the LL Network, which in 2020 entered its third year with over 500 members, and continued with its main aim of promoting gender balance. This is achieved by means of meeting with inspiring women or female role models and personal and professional development workshops, as well as its mentoring programme, which has allowed several dozen women to benefit from the experience of a male or female mentor since the programme was launched.
Key figure
44 % female executive managers at the Lagardère group in 2019.