The incident occurred on September 5, when a delegation from the Hindu movement Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) visited the Eiffel Tower in Paris. According to the French newspaper Le Monde, representatives of the group asked for the visit to be arranged so as to limit “interaction with women”.
The operating company Société d’exploitation de la tour Eiffel (SETE) admitted that it agreed to fulfill this request. Some female employees were told to leave their workstations and stay in staff rooms, and at some posts women were replaced by men.
The CGT union said that women were “removed, replaced, and made invisible because of their gender”, and called what happened contrary to the values of equality and non-discrimination. Female employees at the tower and contractor companies were also ordered not to pass through certain areas while the delegation was there.
On September 7, employees went on strike and refused to return to work, after which the Eiffel Tower remained closed all day. The attraction’s website initially said only that the opening was delayed for “operational reasons”.
Later, SETE admitted that it should not have agreed to such conditions and promised to learn from the incident. The chairman of SETE and mayor of Paris’s central districts, Ariel Weil, called what happened an “obviously unacceptable practice” and said he would find out who made the decision to comply with the visitors’ request.
He also said that neither he nor the Paris city leadership knew in advance about the conditions of the visit. Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire promised to conduct an investigation “as quickly as possible”, and the minister for gender equality, Aurore Bergé, said: “In France, women are not asked to disappear”.
On the evening of September 7, BAPS apologized and said that, as far as the organization knew, “at no point was anyone denied access to the Eiffel Tower”. According to the report, the visit took place on the eve of the opening of a major BAPS temple in Bussy-Saint-Georges, about 30 km east of Paris, and on the morning of September 8 the tower reopened to visitors.
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