CAC 40: more women in management positions in 2024

Three years after the adoption in France of a law on quotas , there are more and more women in the management of large groups , according to a study published this Tuesday by the Skema observatory of the feminization of companies .

In 2024, 28% of positions in the management bodies of CAC 40 companies were occupied by women, an increase of 2 points in one year.

This increase in diversity is a direct effect of the Rixain law , which will soon impose quotas for women in management positions in companies with more than 1,000 employees: 30% in March 2026 and 40% in March 2029. "This law has no equivalent in Western countries," notes Michel Ferrary, researcher affiliated with the Skema business school and director of the observatory.

Companies are preparing for it: in just three years, since the promulgation of the Rixain law in 2021, the proportion of women on executive committees or management committees of CAC 40 companies has increased by more than 8 percentage points.

To do this, companies have not necessarily replaced a man with a woman. "They are rather adding a chair around the table," explains Michel Ferrary. As proof, the number of positions in the management bodies of CAC 40 companies increased by 15 in 2024, those occupied by women by 16, and those by men only decreased by 1.

"We need to look in detail at whether the women appointed occupy positions as important as the men; a communications or CSR director is not the same as a financial director," says Michel Ferrary.

In 2022, the researcher and his colleague Stéphane Déo had combed through the data of 159 listed companies and scrutinized their results according to the degree of diversity of their middle management.

This work had made it possible to "confirm statistically significant relationships between gender diversity at the middle management and employee level, and profitability". They suggested that net margin and EBITDA (gross operating profit, the main profitability indicator for companies) climb when the rate of women approaches 50%, and fall back beyond that.

Low diversity, too many men and few women, or vice versa, weighs on profitability, all other things being equal.

For the 2025 edition of his observatory report, Michel Ferrary this time focused on the link between the feminization of companies and good management of their corporate social responsibility (CSR), based on an indicator measured by the Morningstar Sustainalytics firm .

He found that the more women there were in a company's management bodies, the better the risk management on environmental, social, societal and governance issues.

Without being able to establish a causal link with certainty this time: "Does having more women in a company improve environmental responsibility, or are women more attracted to environmentally responsible companies?" asks Michel Ferrary.

In January, Medef boss Patrick Martin was worried about the deadline for the first quotas of the Rixain law. "We won't be ready," he lamented. "There are jobs that are gendered. In my company," in construction and industry, "I'm tearing my hair out trying to feminize my management committee."

There is a precedent. In 2011, the Copé-Zimmerman law introduced quotas in control bodies, such as boards of directors, which are widely respected today.

"As much as in a board of directors, there are mandates: you appoint a woman in place of a man, it's not dramatic," Patrick Martin estimated. "In the company, it's a little different: when you have a man who has not done badly in a management committee, and we "get rid of him" because we need to feminize the body, it's much more sensitive," he added.

Mr. Ferrary says that since the election of Donald Trump in the United States, he has noticed "a turnaround in companies " on diversity. "Some, like Accenture, McDonald's , or Walmart are reconsidering their diversity policies." "But others, like JPMorgan , refuse to go back on it, because they believe it is a performance factor," he notes.