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Comment on Eiffel Tower employees strike after female staff removed

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Probably not HN-relevant...

But I find it flabbergasting that in 2026 someone in the management thought it'd be okay to tell female staff to hide, just because some delegation demanded it. But for the tech-relevancy angle; They could've asked AI "Would this be fine?".

(Untested, presumably the AI would say "Merde! Non!")

Whether it be corporates, Eiffel Tower management, or religious groups, I guess the new norm is - better to ask for forgiveness.

I am Indian origin so full disclosure done. I saw a picture of the group's 93 year old head in ascetic robes, the one who does not see women, have a picture below Eiffel Tower for memories. Sir, what part of asceticism do you teach?

To play devils advocate: Isn't it that the management had to choose between two potential problematic decisions? What if the management declined the hindu request and then the hindus made a big fuss about it? Wouldn't people scream "how could they think that discriminating the hindu religion would be a good decision?!?".

"They wanted us to hide female staff" would get French society to support them again..

Not even that. Just say "we didn't refuse them entry, they chose not to come because we employ women".

France has a storied history of resisting efforts to impose non-western, extremist beliefs on them

You could start with Charlie Hebdo for an idea of how it might be received if a religious extremist group wanted to fuss over hiding French women from the public.

BAPS denies that they made any such request (let alone a _demand_); seems weird that DW omits any mention of this.

I can see why they would say that.

I can’t see any reason why the tower management would sideline half of their staff without someone asking them to.

But I find it flabbergasting that in 2026 someone in the management thought it'd be okay to tell female staff to hide, just because some delegation demanded it

You're looking at the results of years of indoctrination related to the intersectional pyramid of oppression. On that pyramid you'll quickly find that people of colour practising an exotic religion end up above female employees so (most likely white, male) management thought it better to risk giving in to the former's request out of fear of being called 'racist' or something related. Sad, stupid, silly and totally not fitting Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité but that's what this type of thinking leads to.

As to the answer given by any 'AI' that depends on whether it has been trained to follow the dictats of intersectionality. Unfortunately this seems to be the case [1,2,3] in at least some western models which claim that a woman using violence against a man to prevent a nuclear apocalypse is fine but disagree with a man using violence against a woman for the same purpose, which also refuse to 'misgender' someone to stop the apocalypse, etc. This is not the natural result of ingesting training data but points at a direct effort to instil these values into the model leading to rather crude and easily dismissed results.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-68412620

[3] https://www.broadview.news/p/in-the-event-of-nuclear-war-ple...

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