LEEM wants more women in French drug industry

France's drug industry representative body (LEEM) has signed an accord with the Force Femmes association to introduce a procedure designed to encourage more women to apply for positions in the pharmaceutical sector. One of the new measures under consideration is the extension of the existing anonymized resume system, established with the SOS Racisme antiracism group, to ensure that applicants' ethnic origin is not identifiable at the initial application stage (Marketletter December 10, 2007).

The scheme is geared towards helping women who are returning to the workforce, although the drug industry in France's 103,500 employees are already mostly women (58%), according to 2006 figures.