IN Fran?ois Ozon’s latest film, “Potiche”, Catherine Deneuve (pictured) plays a trophy wife, a potiche, who spends her days jogging in a scarlet jumpsuit, making breakfast for her cantankerous husband and writing poetry perched on a sofa. But then her husband, the boss of an umbrella factory, is taken hostage by striking workers. Ms Deneuve takes over the factory and charms the workers into returning to work. She jazzes up the products and generally proves that anything a man can do, a woman can do better.
在Francois Ozon's最近的电影“瓷瓶”里，Catherine Deneuve扮演了一个宝贝娇妻，一个瓷瓶，终日穿着她那正红色的连身裤，为她那脾气烂透了，且喋喋不休的丈夫准备早餐，然后窝在沙发上写诗。但是不久之后，她的经营着一家雨伞工厂的丈夫，被罢工工人绑架作了人质。这时，Deneuve妇人不得不站出来接管了工厂，并且想方设法得讨好工人并且请求他们回来工作，她盘活了整个工厂，并且向世人证明，所有男人能做的事情，女人都可以作得更好。
The film was set in 1977, when the only women in a typical Western boardroom were serving the coffee. Times have changed. These days no one doubts that women can run companies: think of Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, Carol Bartz at Yahoo! or Ursula Burns at Xerox. Sheryl Sandberg, the number two at Facebook, is more widely applauded than her young male boss, Mark Zuckerberg (see article).
这部电影拍摄于1977年，那时候，只有在特定会议室中的女人才能享用咖啡。如今，时代已经变了，没有人会怀疑女人可以经营公司的事实：想想在百事公司的PepsiCo,再想想雅虎的Carol Bartz, 亦或是在施乐复印的Ursula Burns, Facebook的一姐Sheryi Sandberg,甚至比她的老板Mark Zukerberg更享誉盛名，
Yet the number of female bosses of large firms remains stubbornly small. Not a single one on France’s CAC 40 share index or on Germany’s DAX index is run by a woman. In America, only 15 chief executives of Fortune 500 companies are women. Britain does better, but not much: five of the FTSE-100 firms have female bosses.
尽管如此，大公司中保留的女性老板们仍然屈指可数。法国CAC-40股指期货中的企业和德国DAX股指期货中的企业没有一家是由女性经营的。在美国，世界前500企业中只有15个高管职位是女性。英国的状况似乎要好一些，但也十分有限，金融时报评定的100家公司里有5家是由女性企业家经营。
Several governments, especially in Europe, have decided that radical action is required to increase the number of women in the executive suite. Norway passed a law in 2003 that obliged all publicly listed firms to reserve 40% of the seats on their boards for women by 2008. Spain passed a similar law in 2007; France earlier this year. The Netherlands is working on one.
一些政府，特别是在欧洲的政府，已经觉得采取激进的举措来提高女性在高管席座上的人数。2003年，挪威推出了项法案，强制要求到2008年，所有公共名册中的公司的董事会必须保留40%的席位给女性。西班牙也在2007年通过了一项类似的法案；法国在今年早些时候也颁布了类似法案；而荷兰也正在努力制定相关法案。
On July 6th the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for EU-wide legislation stipulating that at least 40% of seats on listed companies’ supervisory boards will be reserved for women by 2020. This does not oblige member states to do anything, but it reflects a spreading mood. The German government is considering whether to impose quotas. America is not, but new rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission will require firms to reveal what, if anything, they are doing to increase diversity at the top table.
Viviane Reding, the EU commissioner for justice, argues that compulsion is the only way to overcome entrenched discrimination. For a whole year she has tried to cajole companies to take voluntary measures to promote more women. In March, she posted a “Women on the Board Pledge for Europe” on her website. This allows companies to promise that women will make up 30% of their boards by 2015 and 40% by 2020. Only seven companies have signed up so far. Mo?t Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), a French luxury-goods maker, added itself rather ostentatiously on July 12th. But cynics doubt that this owed much to the commissioner’s powers of persuasion. LVMH was only pledging to do what the new French law already obliges it to.
欧盟司法专员Viviane Reding表示，强制是战胜根深蒂固的歧视的唯一方法。在过去的整整一年里，她一直在尝试劝说公司采取自愿的措施来增加女性席位。到了三月，她在自己的网站上发布了"欧洲董事会女性席位保证”。这份保证书要求公司承诺到2015年，将董事会女性席位增加到30%，在2020年完成40%的女性席位承诺。到目前为止，只有7家企业签署了此项保证书，Louis Vuittion,法国著名的奢侈品牌制造商，在7月12日非常高调得将自己列入了保证书的名单中，但是批判家们仍然认为这归功于司法部专员们的说服力，LV也只是作了法国新法案要求作的事情罢了。
There is a powerful business case for hiring more women to run companies. They are more likely to understand the tastes and aspirations of the largest group of consumers in the world, namely women. They represent an underfished pool of talent. And there is evidence that companies with more women in top jobs perform better than those run by men only.
对于雇用更多的女性进入职场有一个很强大的商业动机，那就是他们更容易了解和嗅到世界上最大一群用户的品味和需求，那就是女人,他们代表着一类人的集体智慧。同时，事实也表明在高端职位拥有更多女性高管的公司比只有男性高管的公司表现得更加出色。
McKinsey, a consultancy, recently looked at 89 listed companies in Europe with a very high proportion of women in senior management posts and compared their financial performance with the average for firms in the same industry. It found that these firms enjoyed a higher return on equity, fatter operating profits and a more buoyant share price. The authors described the correlation between promoting women and doing well as “striking”, though they admitted that they could not prove what was causing what. It is possible that firms that are already doing well tend to hire more female directors.
世界有名的咨询公司麦肯锡，最近对欧洲的89家在高级管理职位上女性比例占据很高的公司进行了调查，把它们与同行业的其他公司在业绩上进行了比较。调查发现这些公司在资产回收，运营收益和浮动股价上的表现都更加出色。作者描述了让女性升值和业绩惊人之间的关联性，但是也不能够证明倒是谁是因，谁是过。但是可以成为证据的是现在运营得很好的企业更倾向于聘用更好的女性管理层。
Proponents of quotas cite the superior performance of firms with female directors as evidence that quotas will benefit companies and their shareholders. Sceptics doubt this. The women that companies voluntarily appoint to boards are mostly excellent (indeed, they may have had to be particularly talented to overcome the barriers in their way). The effect of quotas, however, will be to elevate women who would not otherwise get onto the board. It would be surprising if they proved as able as those appointed without such help.
对女性配额职位的拥护者将女性领导的公司业绩表现优秀作为证据，表明为女性配额职位会为公司和股东带来更多的利益。怀疑者们对此表示了质疑，他们认为，由公司自愿选出的女性高管才是真正最优秀的（确实是，他们除了能力之外还必须要在歧视的荆棘中铺平道路），然后定额配制女性高管的话，会让那些能力不够的女性们晋升到很重要的职位上，这样的话，让她们达到没有经过政策配合而上位的女性高管的能力，恐怕是很难的了。
The evidence from Norway, the first European country to impose strict quotas, suggests that compulsion has been bad for business. Norwegian boards, which were 9% female in 2003, were ordered to become 40% female within five years. Many reached that target by window-dressing. The proportion of board members in Norway who are female is nearly three times greater than the proportion of executive directors (see chart).
To obey the law, Norwegian firms promoted many women who were less experienced than the directors they had before. These new hires appear to have done a poor job. A study by Amy Dittmar and Kenneth Ahern of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan found that firms that were forced to increase the share of women on their boards by more than ten percentage points saw one measure of corporate value (the ratio of market capitalisation to the replacement value of assets, known as Tobin’s Q) fall by 18%.
为了遵守新的法案，挪威的公司晋升了很多并没有很多经验的女性担当重任，这些新女性似乎工作效果并不尽如人意。密歇根大学生学院的Dittmar和Kenneth Ahern作了一项调查表明，那些被迫在董事席位上增加女性比例的公司公司的价值平均下跌18%（公司价值：公司资产价值代替市场资本的比例）。
Out of proportion
不成比例
If quotas aren’t the answer, what is? The question is fiendishly complex. In most rich countries, women do as well as men or even better at school and university. In America, most new master’s degrees are awarded to women. Women also hold more than half of the entry-level jobs at American blue-chip companies.
如果定额配置女性工作岗位并不是决解问题的方法，那么什么是真正的可行之道呢？这个问题本身就极其复杂。在学校和大学里，女性表现与男性一样优秀，甚至超过男性。在美国很多的硕士学位都授予了女性。在业绩优秀的公司里，也有超过半数的初级职位由女性来承担。
But corporate women start to fall behind their male peers right from the beginning. They are less aggressive than men when negotiating their first salary and every subsequent pay rise. Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon University found that her male graduate students secured starting salaries 7.6% higher than her female graduate students. In general, men are four times more likely to ask for a pay rise than women are. Compounded over time, this makes a huge difference.
但是，公司里的女员工在工作开始之后就逐渐落后于她们的男同事。他们在协商第一笔工资和之后的升职薪水时都不如男性强势。卡耐基梅陇大学的Linda Babcock发现，他的男性毕业生比女性毕业生的入职工资高出了7.6%，也就是说，男性在要求涨薪和谈判工资方面的能力比女性高处了近四倍，经年累月，就产生了很大的不同.
The higher you gaze up the corporate ladder, the fewer women you see. According to Catalyst, a researcher in New York, women are 37% of the middle managers in big American firms, 28% of the senior managers and a mere 14% of executive-committee members.
你越往事业天梯的上面看，女性的身影就越来越少。根据一个纽约的研究者Catalyst的调查表示，37%的女性在大型美国公司的中层作管理工作，只有28%的女性在高级管理工作，仅有14%的女性在董事委员会任职。
Is discrimination to blame? While firms that discriminate a lot will be eclipsed by those that promote on merit (and possibly sued), that can take time. And men do persistently underestimate women, argues Herminia Ibarra of INSEAD, a business school in France. Ms Ibarra looked at more than 20,000 assessments of INSEAD’s executive students. The men on the faculty judged the women to be just as capable as the men (or more so) in most areas, but thought that they lacked strategic vision. No such lack was seen when their female colleagues judged the students.
是应该归罪于歧视吗？我们需要时间来证明，那些过份性别歧视的公司终将被那些则其优而用之的企业踩在脚下。当然，法国INSEAD商学院的Herminia Ibarra称，男性确实长期以来低估了女性的实力，Ibarra女士研究了INSEAD的高管学生中超过20,000份的测评，研究中发现，职场上的男性在大多数方面都平等得看待女性，但是他们认为女性缺乏战略眼光。但是当女性同事评价她们的学生时，却没有这样的现象。
The way patronage and promotion work within the corporate world may count against women. Nearly all the executives who rise to the top have had a powerful backer, according to Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the author of “The Sponsor Effect”, a report for the Harvard Business Review. Yet women often fail to cultivate what Ms Hewlett calls “relationship capital”. They hesitate to call in favours for fear of seeming pushy. And many are afraid of the gossip that a close relationship with a senior male colleague might provoke.
在企业世界中赞助和升值的方式可能将女性排除在外。根据哈佛大学商学院一篇论文“赞助商影响力”的作者Sylvia Ann Hewlett表示，几乎所有的高管晋升到顶尖职位的案例，背后都有一个很有势力的支援者，但是女性往往会输在对“关系资源”的积累和培养上。他们在要求帮助上面显得很犹豫，也许他们觉得这样做会给对方带来压迫感，而且她们中的很多人也很害怕和男性高管之间的种种关系的八卦。
No doubt all of this plays its part. But a much bigger obstacle to putting more women in boardrooms is that so many struggle to balance work and a family.
毫无疑问，上述所有这些都是阻碍女性在职场上发挥的因素，但是，一个更大的阻碍女性进入董事会办公桌的因素确实很多在工作和家庭之间的挣扎。
In all societies, at least for now, women shoulder most of the burden of looking after children and ageing parents. European women devote twice as much time as men to domestic tasks, according to McKinsey. It varies from country to country. Latin men are slacker than Nordics. Italian men spend only 1.3 hours a day on domestic chores, whereas Italian women spend 5.2 hours. In Sweden, the ratio is a somewhat fairer 2.3 hours to 3.4.
在历史上所有的社会里，或者至少是现在，女性都承担着照顾老人和小孩的责任和负担。根据麦肯锡的调查，欧洲的女性在投入家庭事务上比男性大两倍。这个数据根据不同的国家呈现出不同的数值变化。拉丁语系国家的男性比北欧国家的男性更加懒散。意大利男人平均每天只花1.3个小时在家庭事务上，意大利女性却要平均花费5.2小时处理家庭琐碎。在瑞典，情况要好一些，男性的和女性的时间付出比例达到了2.3小时vs3.4小时。
Partly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able women opt for jobs with predictable hours, such as human resources or accounting. They also gravitate towards fields where their skills are less likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is perhaps one reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but only 18% of engineers.
A study by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, a think-tank based in New York, found that, in 2009, 31% of American women had taken a career break (for an average of 2.7 years) and 66% had switched to working part-time or flexible-time in order to balance work and family. Having left the fast track, many women find it hard to get back on.
一个纽约的智囊团机构，“工作+生活”中心的一项调查发现，在2009年，31%的职场女性休过长假（平均为2.7年），他们的66%选择了兼职或者时间更加灵活的工作以应对家庭和事业的平衡。如果以及错过了一班快车，很多女性发现要追回去实在太难。
A juggling act
多重任务
Some governments try hard to help women combine a career and family. France and the Scandinavian countries help with child care. Crèches and nurseries are subsidised. State schools will hang on to the little monsters well into the evening. This contrasts starkly with American and British schools, which boot them out long before an adult’s work day is over. American parents must also square the circle of ultra-short holidays for grown-ups and absurdly long ones for kids.
一些政府很努力的尝试帮助女性将一份事业和家庭结合。法国政府和斯堪的纳维亚半岛的国家政府帮助照看小孩。托儿所和婴幼儿看护所收到政府的资金补助，国立学校会将调皮的小孩们一直守到晚上。这样的举措与美国和英国的学校大不相同，英美的学校在早于家长下班时间很多的时候就让小孩放任自流。美国的家长必须安排短期旅游时间给自己的大孩子，并且安排很长的时间给自己的小小孩。
German parents enjoy 14 months of Elterngeld (taxpayer-funded parental leave). The aim is to encourage women to take shorter breaks from their job after giving birth. The law, which passed in 2006, was pushed by Ursula von der Leyen, the then family minister (and a mother of seven). Ms von der Leyen also sponsored a 2008 law promising every one-year-old the right to a free nursery place by 2013.
德国的父母享受14个月的父母金（纳税人支付父母性的假期）。这样做的目的是为了让女性休更少的产假。这样法案在2006年通过，并且由Ursula von der leyen推举，她后来成为了家庭部长（也是七个孩子的母亲）。她后来也发起了另一项2008年的法案，承诺到2013年，每一个一岁的小朋友都有权享有一个免费的幼儿园。
Now the labour minister, Ms von der Leyen is pushing hard for Germany to introduce Norwegian-style mandatory quotas for women in boardrooms. German companies are scared. Some are setting themselves voluntary targets in the hope of avoiding state coercion.
现在von der Leyen已经是德国的劳动部部长，她在很努力的推进德国引进仿照荷兰式的为女性定额配置职位的法案。德国的企业感到很有压力。他们中的很多企业家都自愿制定了晋升女性法案，以避免国家的胁迫。
Deutsche Telekom, a German media behemoth, has declared that 30% of its middle and upper management jobs will be filled by women by 2015. “We have tried mentoring, coaching and networks, but nothing worked,” says Anne Wenders, a spokeswoman for the company. Women made up 30% of Deutsche Telekom’s staff and 13% of the company’s top managers in Germany when the policy was introduced last year. These numbers have yet to budge. Still, following Deutsche Telekom’s example, all 30 companies in the DAX index recently agreed to set themselves similar goals.
德国电信，一家泰斗级的德国媒体企业，已经宣布到2015年，会有30%的中层和高层职位由女性来承担。“我们已经尝试了指导，训练和网络帮助，但是没有一个起了作用，”公司的一个发言人Anne Wenders表示。在去年这项原则被推出的时候，德国电信的30%员工是女性，其中13%拥有高层职位。这些数据于它们之前的承诺有一些出入，但是，随着德国电信的首开先河，所有DAX指数的30个企业都同意制定想类似的晋升标准。
Women bring unique strengths to a company, reckons Lisa Gersh, the boss of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, a merchandising and media firm founded by a lifestyle guru. They are more collaborative than men, says Ms Gersh, and better at multitasking. Those with children quickly become efficient. They know that they have to be home at a certain time.
Lisa Gersh表示，女性为公司带来了神奇的力量，她是Martha Stewart Living Ominimedia的老板，这是一家由lifestyle guru创办的销售和媒体公司。Gersh女士表示，女性比男性更容易合作，并且更擅长多任务型工作。那些有小孩的女性会自然更加有效率，应该她们知道她们必须要在确切的时间赶回家。
Companies everywhere are trying to figure out ways to help employees juggle their work and family life. Technology should make this easier. Thanks to broadband internet, many tasks can be done from home. Nearly 20% of American employees telecommuted last year. Some female executives routinely take calls while outside the school gates. As the tussle for talent intensifies, such scenes will grow more common.
全世界各地的企业都在试图找出帮助员工平衡家庭和事业的方法。技术应该能使这个尝试变得更加容易，多亏了遍布各地的网络，很多工作可以在家里完成。有将近20%的美国员工去年进行远程办公。一些女性高管在孩子的校门口进行远程电话会议。随着争夺人才变得越来越激烈，这样的画面会逐渐变得更加普遍。
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