Sanofi — Gender balance in business: From words to action

Originally published on Sanofi.com.

Sanofi believes in the absolute necessity of gender balance. The company has long been committed to addressing these gaps and to promoting the place of women on its teams and in the healthcare industry. Our goal is bold: by 2025, the company’s 1,900 senior leaders will include as many women as men.

Increasing the number of women in executive ranks has been shown to be a strong predictor of business performance, including better organizational effectiveness and financial results. Throughout my career, I have personally witnessed this strong link between women’s leadership and economic and managerial performance. Gender parity is a positive force for society, for the success of companies, and for the growth of the global economy. Today it is an imperative for all companies, and collectively we must move from words to action.

Objective: 50/50

At Sanofi, in 2018, 46% of our total workforce is comprised of women, which brings us close to parity. But women make up only 36% of our senior leaders. That is why our executive committee is mobilizing around a common goal: to achieve gender balance among our senior leaders by 2025.

Gender equality is now an anchor of Sanofi’s culture, values and strategy. We are creating leadership development programs for women, deploying a long-term internal campaign on the importance of gender balance and, critically, we’ve embedded our 50/50 gender balance goal in the performance objectives of Sanofi’s executive committee.

We are also committed to creating an inclusive work culture to help employees better reconcile work and personal life, nurturing the needs and aspirations of our global workforce. We have broadened the definition of family leave to include young parents, adoptive families, and caregivers, and we are using new technologies to support people to work more flexibly. This enables our employees to improve the lives of patients around the world—without sacrificing their family life.

Women play a major role in company performance and in improving the functioning of teams. They inspire creativity through their different perspectives and thus increase our capacity to develop innovative treatments. It is therefore essential that we ensure the attractiveness of our jobs for talented women— it is up to us to support them in their careers and work to retain them. This drives our commitment to tangible change, both inside our company and externally.

As part of our commitment, Sanofi has been a partner and an active member of the Women’s Forum for eight years. We look forward to participating in the Women’s Forum 2018 event, working together to increase inclusiveness, advance opportunities for women, and better serve patients around the world.

Olivier Brandicourt, Chief Executive Officer, Sanofi

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