Reflets Magazine #150 | Elisabeth Moreno (EXEC MBA 06), Acting for Equality

Reflets Mag #150 is devoting its cover feature to Elisabeth Moreno (EXEC MBA 06), who retraces her path from a small town in Cabo Verde to Deputy Minister for Gender Equality, Diversity & Equal Opportunity, and reveals how she is pursuing the fight for inclusion since her return to the private sector. Here is a free online translation of an excerpt  of the article...subscribe to get the next issues (in French)!

Reflets Magazine: Last spring you were appointed to Sanofi Group’s Diversity, Equality & Inclusion Board (DE&I) for a 3-year term. What is your role?

Élisabeth Moreno: My role is simple yet complex. The most serious consultancy firms have been emphasising the importance of diversity, equality and inclusion for years now; how these considerations make businesses more profitable, efficient, productive, and above all, more welcoming. Sure, we want to work with people like us, but also with colleagues who can bring us something you won’t find elsewhere. We are enriched by others’ difference. It’s one thing to know what diversity, equality and inclusion can bring to a company, but it’s another to know how to implement the right policies in a major group such as Sanofi, which has over 95,000 employees and operations in more than 50 countries, encompassing some fifty professions and dealing with the eminently human issue of health. When Paul Hudson [CEO of Sanofi, editor’s note] told me about his ambition to become the first major French group to decisively embody these concerns, I thought ‘jackpot’!

RM: So we’re talking about a genuine engagement on the part of Sanofi...

É. Moreno: The group serves all sorts of customers in every continent. In this respect, diversity is thus an obvious aspect of a company like Sanofi. However, equality and inclusion are more difficult to implement in such a large group. This is why we are prioritising the universal issues of diversity, i.e., gender, cultural and social background, sexual preference, or health and disability. It’s absolutely fascinating! Sanofi has clearly understood that by drawing on its employees’ diversity, the group can grow even closer to its customers.

RM: Was it this same mindset that led you to join the board of Each One, a start-up specialised in helping refugees to join major groups?

É. Moreno: I’ve been involved in the fight for equal opportunities and gender equality since entering higher education. Through mentoring and career guidance, I’ve helped a lot of young people to succeed. I’ve managed to shatter several glass ceilings myself, and I’ve always believed that success is only meaningful when shared. I come from an immigrant family, and am the fruit of Republican meritocracy. I started out with nothing, and thanks to education, work and the people I was lucky enough to meet along my way, I managed to topple brick and even concrete walls. When I left the French Government, I was approached by Théo Scubla [co-founder of Each One - editor’s note], who explained to me what Each One does, and I was naturally compelled, owing to my own background. The immigrants coming from the South to the North rarely leave behind their family and friends to embark on a perilous and uncertain adventure for the fun of it. They are fleeing wars, famine, poverty or the consequences of climate change. This forced immigration is often undertaken in the direst circumstances. When these people arrive in a country like France, where universalism has such powerful meaning, they have one dream: to rebuild their lives in dignity, and certainly not live off family allowance or minimum welfare benefits, as some malicious people would have us believe. In these circumstances, either we allow these people to find a job and be a part of the country’s economy, or they become a burden to society. Each One opted to assist these people through training and thus enable them to live with dignity. There are numerous companies and sectors in our country which are struggling to recruit, while on the other hand, we have people desperately seeking employment. Each One builds bridges between these two worlds. This is a pragmatic, wise and humanist way to partially solve the issue of migration.

RM: You launched your own non-profit organisation, La Puissance du Lien, at the start of this year. What inspired you?

É. Moreno: I recently read a press article about a survey Harvard has been running for more than 75 years, involving 600 people from highly diverse socio-cultural and economic backgrounds. Starting in their teenage years, these people were surveyed annually and asked a simple question: what made you happy this year? Systematically, every year, the vast majority of respondents said that what made them happiest were the bonds they maintain with their family, friends, community, neighbours, organisation or workmates. This has been repeatedly demonstrated down the road; human ties are essential to our happiness. In times of crisis, these become the most weakened bonds because we tend to turn inwards and look for scapegoats to blame our woes on. I don’t remember ever seeing our country as divided and fractured as now. Yet the best way to overcome these political, social, economic, health, environmental and geopolitical crises is to join forces: unite our knowledge, skills and expertise to address the challenges of this changing world. That’s why I decided to create the non-profit organisation La Puissance du Lien [The Power of the Link], to remind us that our human ties are a source of hope and a solution to the many issues we face collectively. We work with charities, companies and public institutions, and deal with topics such as the bonds between men and women, intergenerational ties, and links between our regions. The feedback from our participants has been enthusiastic and encouraging.

RM: 2023 has been a decidedly rich year for you in terms of engagement, as you were also appointed to the presidency of the Femmes@numérique foundation [‘Women@digital’] last June. How do you explain the lack of diversity in this economic sector which is nevertheless highly promising?

É. Moreno: When I entered the tech world 25 years ago, there were more women in the sector than today. At present, there are more young women following digital studies in emerging countries than in France. I love pointing out that the pioneer of computing, in the first half of the 19th century, was in fact a woman, the English mathematician Ada Lovelace, but it wasn’t until her fellow countryman Alan Turing took up her work a century later that computing ‘officially’ came into being. Studies show that when certain sectors such as computing, numerical or digital start to grow, as soon as they become spheres of power, women are generally sidelined, or pull out of their own accord. There are still too many biases and stereotypes regarding the professions women should or should not have. Therefore, if we do not implement tools to fight these forms of prejudice, if we do not remind our children that jobs have no gender; if you do not explain to a young girl that in the digital sector you can bring music to people everywhere in the world, you can treat patients or enable children distanced from school to read or learn maths; if we don’t change the current system, it will become very complicated. We must create a new system which includes parents, teachers, companies, community groups and all institutions. It’s no longer a moral or ethical question; it has become a competitive emergency.

RM: You entered the world of entrepreneurship at a very early age with the creation of a construction company. What was your aim at the time?

É. Moreno: [Article to be continued in Reflets Magazine #150]

Interview by François de Guillebon, Chief Editor of Reflets Magazine, and Michel Zerr, Reporter for Reflets Magazine.

Translation of an excerpt of an article published in Reflets Magazine #150. Get a preview (in French). Get the next issues (in French).