French TV station feminist ad pulled for being sexist
A school of engineers in southern France called ISIS said Wednesday it ran into trouble with Canadian customs agents worried over a possible link to the jihadist group with the same initials.
08.10.2015
(AFP) A French TV station was forced to pull an advert boasting about its
feminist credentials after it met with ridicule and criticism saying the
ad itself was sexist.
The 40-second spot on France 3 was designed to highlight the
station's positive record on female employment, with the tagline "The
majority of our presenters are women presenters".
But in a spectacular own goal, the advert decided to illustrate its
point by showing domestic chores that were going wrong without a woman
around.
It featured a series of shots of a house in disarray: a meal
overheating in the oven, a child's room left untidy, an iron left to
burn a shirt.
"Where are the women?" asks a popular French hit on the soundtrack.
Viewers are told that all this shameful dereliction of female duties is due to the fact that "the women" are "at France 3".
It was enough to get a response from France's minister for women's
rights, Pascale Boistard, who tweeted that "it did not seem like the
best way to promote equal rights".
Delphine Ernotte, head of the station's parent company, hastily
ordered the advert to be yanked, but not before it had received many
more criticisms on social media.
France 3 "wants to promote feminisation of its workplace and serves
us a heap of cliches," wrote Balle de Sexisme, the Twitter account of a
feminist blog.