The “perfect woman” syndrome. What if the feeling of guilt generated professional inequality between women and men in French companies?

Abstract

This paper stems from an intuition: What if women's feelings of guilt generated professional inequality in France? This intuition leads us to pose a research question that makes us, first, question the concept of feelings of guilt and to analyze whether the literature perceives this feeling as a potential vector of professional inequality between men and women. Secondly, we seek to identify whether companies share our intuition and include in their “professional equality” agreements actions likely to have an impact on women's feelings of guilt at work. An analysis of forty-eight “Professional Equality” agreements of French companies concluded in 2011 and 2012 shows that none of the agreements directly address women's feelings of guilt in order to combat professional inequality. On the other hand, it shows that organizations indirectly affect this feeling through actions that aim to change social expectations of women, gender roles, and to limit work-family conflicts of individuals at work.