From Business Manager
to Division Director

MP: How do you live your daily life as a woman in a position of responsibility?

EF: If you want me to say it is challenging, well it is! As a woman, you must prove yourself more and deal with social habits and ways of thinking that are set-in-stone.

For instance, if you are passionate, you end up being “emotional”, if you talk back and express your disagreement, you are being “sensitive”! As a woman, you need a great sense of humor, “glib repartee”, and self-confidence. 

You may have to face some team members, sometimes even kindly meant, offering to take over for you at a strategic point because they think you might not be able to deal with all the pressure.

I think the turning point is when a woman in a position of responsibility becomes a mother, when a family is at stake and when the crucial issue is to deal with the allocation of your time, energy, and priority. 

The main challenge for me was to recognize that I wanted to have it all, and therefore to deal with 3 days in one, each of the parties involved having equal rights. I also learnt to deal with all the doubts, judgments, and questioning. Obviously, it is easier when you have some support at home!

I am convinced that getting better in each job helped me in the other one. The skills at stake are quite similar. Indiscriminately I am making choices hourly, decisions with few pieces of information, managing crisis big and small, trying to be fair, refocusing and encouraging, getting over big disappointments, celebrating a success, striving to stay whole.

When my opinion about quotas was asked, spontaneously I answered I was rather against because one should get appointed or promoted thanks to their capacity and not their gender or color. I might have been naïve about it. To enforce a law that has been passed in 2014 you need monitoring and controlling. But to reach a target of at least a third of women in a top management position, you need a larger number at the middle management position. The quotas help to get this base. It is pure conversion rate. Three women at senior positions can set an example, thirty will set up new standards.

It is also rewarding, but I would not say in an extraordinary way as a woman, but in an extraordinary way as a manager in general, male or female, to be driven by the obsession of hitting a target. So, when I succeed, I do not feel different than my male counterparts. We are perfectly equal.

As a conclusion to your question about living my daily life as a woman in a position of responsibility, it is a bit of a challenge, but nothing compared to what women achieved when fighting for their rights throughout these last decades, and I am absolutely confident that it will be easier in the years to come.