Equal on Paper: What Working Women Actually Encounter in France and Australia

🇫🇷 France · 🇦🇺 Australia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

France mandates that companies publish a numeric gender equality score out of 100 every March 1st, under threat of a fine worth up to 1% of annual payroll; Australia now publishes individual employers' gender pay gaps by name, twice a year, for the entire country to see. Both nations have built elaborate public accountability machines for gender equity — and both still report double-digit pay gaps once you leave the press release and read the footnotes. A woman relocating to either country will find transparency in abundance and equality still very much in progress.

Do's & Don'ts

🇫🇷 France

🇦🇺 Australia

France: Regulation Ahead of Reality

France has built one of the most codified gender-transparency regimes in the OECD. The Index Egapro requires companies with more than 50 employees to score themselves annually across five weighted indicators — pay gap, raise distribution, promotion rates, post-maternity raises, and representation among top earners — and publish the result. The average company scored 88 out of 100 in 2024, but only 2% hit a perfect score, and the government's own reporting flags stagnation specifically around women's pay after returning from maternity leave. New quota law now requires 30% female executives by March 2026, rising to 40% by 2029; as of the most recent filings, 57% of large companies still fell short of even the 30% threshold.

The gap between formal compliance and lived experience is where a new arrival will feel the friction. A Défenseur des Droits study reported by The Local found 80% of working women say they regularly face sexist decisions or attitudes at work, while 60% choose not to report it for fear of career consequences. Meanwhile, gross gender pay gaps run near 28% once bonuses and hours are folded in, even as like-for-like role comparisons narrow to roughly 9%.

Australia: Transparency as a National Sport

Australia took a more public-shaming approach: since 2024, WGEA has published individual employer gender pay gaps by name, and its 2025 Scorecard covered more than 8,200 employers and 5.4 million workers. The national gap sits at 21.1% in total remuneration terms — women earning 78.9 cents for every male dollar — though the gap has narrowed 0.7 percentage points year over year, and legislated targets now require large employers to commit to specific gender-equality goals starting in 2026.

What makes the Australian system distinctive is its bluntness: any candidate can look up a specific company's numbers before an interview, something France's aggregate scoring model doesn't fully replicate. But publication alone hasn't closed the gap — women still make up a minority of high-paid roles, and the informal, mateship-driven culture of many Australian workplaces can mean advancement runs through networks that quietly favor those already inside them.

The Reckoning

Both countries have chosen transparency as the primary lever for change, but they've built very different transparency machines. France scores companies against a fixed formula, producing a tidy number that can mask exactly where the failure sits — a company can post an 88 while still failing women returning from leave. Australia names employers outright, which is more embarrassing but also more legible: you can see precisely which company is worst in your industry.

The deeper irony is that the country with more codified law — France — reports a higher rate of workers experiencing everyday sexism, at least by self-report, while Australia's looser, more informal culture produces a wider raw pay gap. Hofstede Insights scores France notably higher on power distance (68) than Australia (36), and that difference matters here: French hierarchy makes formal complaint channels feel more legitimate but also higher-stakes to use, while Australian flatness makes raising an issue directly to a manager more normal but the informal "banter" culture harder to formally escalate.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — An American woman who relocated to Paris for a corporate role wrote that the biggest adjustment wasn't the language but learning to name discomfort explicitly in meetings — French colleagues, she said, respected directness far more than the polite hedging she'd been trained to use back home.

The Local France — A British woman working in Lyon described requesting her company's Index Egapro breakdown before signing an offer, and found HR visibly unprepared for the question — she took it as a signal the number was more compliance exercise than lived commitment.

r/AskAnAustralian — One relocated Canadian manager described being caught off guard by how quickly flexible-work requests were normalized in her Melbourne office, but noted a quieter pattern where colleagues who used them regularly were passed over for stretch projects without anyone naming why.

teamblind.com — A tech employee who moved from a Sydney startup to a Paris-based multinational said the formality of French meetings initially read as cold, until she realized the same directness meant her ideas were challenged on substance rather than diplomatically ignored.

Internations Sydney — An expat HR professional advised newcomers to check WGEA's public employer data before every negotiation, calling it "the one genuinely useful thing the government publishes" for salary conversations.

Conclusion

If you're weighing where the ground is more solid underfoot, the honest answer is neither is finished, but they fail differently. France gives you the clearest legal recourse and a public scorecard, at the cost of a workplace culture that still tolerates a striking amount of everyday sexism by its own government's measure. Australia gives you brutally specific pay data and an informal culture that's easier to challenge directly, but a raw pay gap that hasn't closed nearly as fast as the headlines suggest. Look up the actual numbers for your specific employer before you sign anything — in both countries, they're public, and in both countries, they usually tell you more than the interview will.