French Women Storm the Corporate Boardroom

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Until Chirac took her seat, Arnault's daughter Delphine was the only woman on LVMH's 17-member board.

"The choice was astonishing," says Viviane Neiter, a corporate governance consultant who queried Arnault at the meeting. "There have been recent nominations at French companies that don't seem altogether helpful." Neiter, who along with Miriam Garnier of the European Professional Women's Network lobbies to get women into boardrooms, says boosting the number of women directors should be used as a way to improve governance in France, rather than trying to meet the quota with unthreatening, politically connected women.

"It would be a huge mistake if boards made quantitative changes to their composition without improving quality," Garnier said. "There is the potential to make cosmetic changes by adding women with political considerations in mind. This would be a terrible distortion of the law."

About 170 female directors would have to be found within six years to meet the quota requirement for France's benchmark CAC 40 Index companies and 1,200 for the larger SBF 120 Index, according to Marc G. Lamy, who heads executive search company Boyden France. "This is not mission impossible for headhunters," he said. "There's no dearth of candidates."

Corporate boards have long been criticized for being cozy clubs made up of men from France's elite administrative, business, and engineering schools, known as the grandes écoles, who often are CEOs of other big companies. Adding more women to even a fraction of French boardrooms could have a big impact on the nation's highly concentrated power structure. For instance, at CAC 40 companies, where boards are about 12 percent female, 98 directors, or 22 percent of the total, hold 43 percent of the voting rights, according to a study published in October by Ernst & Young and France Proxy, which call the group "the biggest network of influence in French capitalism."

The bottom line: French boardrooms have long been a male domain. A proposal requiring that at least 40 percent of directors be women could change that.

Patel is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

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