The Eiffel Tower’s shameful cover-up of women

Paris is supposed to be the city of romance. Yet there has long been a gap between the dream and the reality. People go expecting a glossy, pastel-toned fantasy, and instead arrive to find sheer audio-visual chaos.

And chaos there certainly was this week, at one of its most iconic landmarks. On Monday, the Eiffel Tower shut its doors entirely because its own staff went on strike. This was in response to what had happened on Saturday, when female employees were pulled from their posts, moved out of sight and, in some cases, replaced by men – all so that a visiting delegation from the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a Hindu religious movement, would not have to interact with them.

The Eiffel Tower’s decision to accede to BAPS’s request was absurd. This is not a private members’ club making its own rules behind closed doors. This is a state-owned national monument, one of the most recognisable symbols of France on Earth, telling its own female staff to ‘step aside’ at the request of visitors who wanted ‘limited interactions with women’. According to the CGT union, which represents the staff, some women were told to leave their posts entirely, others were swapped out for men, and all female employees were instructed to avoid certain areas while the delegation passed through.

The response has been fast and, on the surface, unanimous. Union rep Diane Davoine said women were humiliated as they were told to leave their workstations so men could take their place. Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire called the exclusion ‘unacceptable’. France’s equality minister, Aurore Bergé, posted that gender equality in France is ‘neither negotiable nor subject to varying standards’. Even SETE, the company that runs the tower, admitted the arrangement should never have been agreed to. Everyone, it seems, agrees that this was wrong.

Good. But condemnation after the fact is almost beside the point. The real question is how this was ever allowed to happen at all. France is supposed to pride itself on the principle of laïcité – which protects the right to believe, or not to believe, while strictly keeping religion out of public life and public institutions. And yet management at one of France’s most important public sites looked at a request to hide its female staff from sight and gave a Gallic shrug.

Note, as ever, who was asked to disappear. It is always women. When it comes to ‘respecting’ this kind of religious sensitivity, it is women who are always moved and hidden. It is women who are told to wait somewhere else so that men can be spared the ordeal of being in the same room as them.

Britain is suffering from the same problem. Public Iftar events have been staged with women ‘pushed to the back’. Only this week, Labour MP Stella Creasy posted a celebratory video of Walthamstow’s Milad al-Nabi march marking Muhammad’s birthday. Only men appeared in the clip Creasy shared. Only after commenters on the post asked where the women were did Creasy head out to find some to film.

No matter how Western societies choose to organise themselves – whether through uniform citizenship and enforced secularism as in France, or through multiculturalism as in Britain – the same failures ensue. When religions insist on overriding the hard-won rights of women, they surely lose the right to have their ‘sensitivities’ respected.