Key figures
-Among French retailers, the average score on the equality index is 91.8%, an increase of almost 1 point in 2 years.
-Electronics and car equipment retailers gained 2 and 5 points respectively in 2024. Conversely, e-commerce and fashion lost 1.3 and 0.8 points.
-The sticking point is the pay gap between men and women, particularly in e-commerce and automotive equipment. As a result, the proportion of women among high earners is not on target in any sector.
For the past 5 years in France, companies with more than 50 staff have been required to publish their gender equality score to the Ministry of Labour. By the deadline of March 10, 2025, 18,261 companies had submitted figures for the year to December 2024, representing 80% of the total. This is a significant increase on the 77% and 72% figures for 2023 and 2022 respectively. This score, on a scale of 100, is the sum of points calculated on the following criteria: gender pay gap (40 points), gap in annual increases (20 or 35 points depending on the number of employees), increases on return from maternity leave (15 points) and presence of women among the highest earners in the company (10 points). Companies with more than 250 employees must also calculate an additional indicator as a gap in promotions (15 points).
8 retail sectors under the microscope
To delimit the analysis, we selected from among the hundred or so sectors listed by INSEE, the companies in 8 sub-sectors belonging to the fields covered by mind Retail (via their SIREN codes) : they represented 2051 companies in total. These were large and medium-sized retailers (1,506 companies), fashion and other speciality retailers (227), e-commerce and distance selling (108), household appliances and home equipment (95), specialised food retailers (39), sports, toy and cultural stores (39), automotive equipment (22) and electronics (15).
Among them, 1,812 retailers and e-retailers with more than 50 employees reported their results to the Ministry of Labour at the end of 2024.
