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French President Macron Is Keeping His Gender-Equality Promise

Emmanuel Macron unveiled his new 22-person Cabinet this week — and 11 of those people are women.

By: Briana Koeneman

Posted at 3:15 PM, May 18, 2017

and last updated 2017-05-18 15:15:29-04

It looks like new French President Emmanuel Macron is keeping his promise to put more women in government.

Macron unveiled his new 22-person Cabinet this week, and 11 of those people are women.

That list includes Olympian Laura Flessel as the new minister of sports, and publisher Françoise Nyssen as the minister of culture.

The Cabinet appointments came just days after Macron's party submitted its candidates for France's upcoming parliamentary elections.

Of the more than 400 candidates the party chose, half were women.

These moves fulfill a pledge Macron made during his campaign to take gender equality in France's government seriously.

But he also has another goal in mind: to win a majority in France's government. If he succeeds, he says he'll work to make it an equal representation of women and men.

It's an ambitious objective. As a writer for Quartz points out, women make up more than half of Parliament in only two other countries: Rwanda and Bolivia.