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By Nikla Gibson , PARIS, May 22 (Reuters) Men will still dominate France's parliament after next month's legislative elections despite a law aimed at ensuring that political parties field equal numbers of male and female candidates.

Mainstream parties have largely ignored a recent left-wing reform to encourage sexual equality in national politics. Just 38 percent, rather than the intended 50 percent, of candidates standing in June's two-round election are women."Enough women want to get into politics but the problem is mainsteam parties have yet to change their attitude to women," Janine Mossuz-Lavau, a member of the government's Observatory for Parity between Men and Women, told Reuters.

"Given that not all those female candidates have been given winnable seats, we cannot realistically hope for more than 20 percent of the National Assembly's 577 seats," Mossuz-Lavau said.

Although such a result would be an improvement on the 11 percent of the last 50 years - when only Greece trailed France in a European Union league table of women in parliament - France would still lag behind eight of its EU partners.

However, Mossuz-Lavau said the doubling in the number of female candidates standing this year, from the 20 percent seen in 1997, signalled that the tide was changing in French politics, albeit slowly.

Most resistant to this change were the mainstream parties who fielded the lowest percentage of women candidates despite the threat of having state funding partially withheld.

Reforms in the 1990s prompted by party funding scandals banned donations by business and interest groups and set aside state subsidies on a per-vote and per-seat basis. The parity law introduced since the legislative elections in 1997 reduces this funding for those parties who fail to comply.

President Jacques Chirac's right-wing coalition Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP) has 20 percent female candidates and the former ruling Socialist Party has 35 percent.

"They made a simple calculation: lost revenue on one side, men in power on the other, which meant that women were the losers," Mossuz-Lavau said.

Many smaller parties, such as the ecologist Green Party, and those with little chance of winning any seats did better on meeting the equality quota as for them state funding is vital.

Unlike for municipal elections, the law on sexual parity at national level - which was a global first - does not oblige parties to have as many women as men candidates but sanctions them financially if they do not.

"How can we expect our citizens to respect the law if our political leaders choose not to apply it fully," Francoise de Panafieu, a Paris local district mayor, told LCI television. De Panafieu, once ridiculed by a male colleague as a "spoilt and badly brought-up child", said the dearth of female candidates was largely due to the fact that French politics remained a male bastion and inherently macho.

Mossuz-Lavau agreed, but said some parties were worse than others with the right wing particularly bad at recognising the new status of women. Chirac's interim right-wing government has given fewer posts to women that the previous Socialist government.

However she, like a UMP deputy interviewed by France 3 television, was optimistic that with more women now involved in local politics the situation should improve at national level.

"We have had to field many male candidates, which I regret, but I think last year's municipal elections means we now have a generation of experienced women and future deputies that will see an improvement in this," Claude Goasguen said.

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