Full employment will not be achieved without women. However, they remain largely forgotten in integration policies, even though they could respond to recruitment tensions.
French companies, like public authorities, have never talked so much about recruitment. However, by looking ever further for candidates, an essential question remains in the blind spot: have we really thought about all the profiles? Because behind the persistent tensions in industry, construction and services lies a largely under-exploited pool of women.
Structural reforms, labor shortage, full employment objective… recruitment has become a major economic issue. In 2025, the employment rate of 15-64 year olds will reach 69.4%setting a new record since INSEE measurements began. However, this progression masks persistent gaps between women and men: 66.9% of women are employed, compared to 71.9% of men. Women also participate less in the labor market (72.3% versus 78.0%) and continue to work part-time much more often (26.6% versus 8.4%).
These figures reveal an underestimated reality: women constitute, in fact, one of the groups furthest from employment. Not because they are less employable, but because they more often experience discontinuous career paths, marked by interruptions in careerfamily responsibilities or peripheral brakes.
A blind spot in reintegration, but not by chance
When we talk about integration, attention spontaneously turns towards young people without qualifications or seniorsbut other audiences are less visible.
Women are rarely identified as a group requiring specific support. Yet alone 44.8% of them find employment within 6 months of registering with France Travail, compared to 50.4% for men. Even more revealing, only 8% of them are moving towards predominantly male professions, such as construction or industry, even though these sectors are struggling to recruit.
If women are not considered as an audience removed from employment, it is not because they are less so, but because we collectively continue to associate family responsibilities with women. According to the OECD, these social norms fuel the motherhood penalty : they push women to interrupt their careers, reduce their working hours and slow down their progress. Their distance from employment is therefore not less; it is, in a certain way, socially accepted. And it is this normalization that is today slowing down their sustainable return to employment.
Recruitment, a distorted game from the starting line
Faced with recruitment tensions, companies are expanding their pools, speeding up training or recruiting based on potential rather than qualifications. These initiatives are a step in the right direction, but are based on an implicit assumption: candidates are already available to work. However, for many women who are far from employment, the difficulty is not finding an offer, but the ability to respond to it.
Even before the interview, it is often necessary to remove very concrete obstacles, childcare, mobilityrefresher course, self-confidence. The first obstacle is not the job itself: it is everything that prevents access to it.
Integration can therefore no longer be reduced to a connection between supply and demand, but must become global support, capable of removing the social, personal and professional obstacles which condition a lasting return to employment.
Coming back to work isn’t enough if it’s always in the same place
Even back on the job market, women concentrate on a limited number of professions that are already feminized, personal services, commerce, administrative functionswhile sectors in tension (construction, industry, logistics) remain largely male-dominated. Nothing coincidental: these representations are formed from school orientation and persist in the advice given to job seekers, even in recruitment practices.
In other words, encouraging women’s return to employment is not enough if it locks them into the same professions.
This is a missed opportunity, for them and for businesses. Professional reintegration can become a real lever for broadening the field of possibilities, shaking up habits and opening access to more remunerative and promising professions, while meeting the needs of sectors in tension.
Support, a lever for competitiveness
Full employment will not be achieved only by providing more training or making certain professions more attractive. It requires accepting a reality: not all candidates start from the same starting line.
Faced with recruitment difficulties, the real question is no longer where to find talent, but why those who already exist, often nearby, remain forgotten.
Making women who are far from employment an identified, recognized and supported public is not a favorable policy. It means recognizing that equality of opportunity does not consist of offering the same solutions to everyone, but of responses adapted to different obstacles.
We still need to give them the means for a lasting return, and the freedom to access all professions.
