Of creeps and crèches

THERE is a scene in “Marseille”, a new television drama billed as a French version of “House of Cards”, in which an ambitious deputy mayor holds a campaign meeting in his office. A photo is selected for election leaflets. New polls provoke cheers. As the male staff file out, the deputy mayor shuts the door behind them, detaining the sole young woman on his team. “A good poll should be celebrated,” he mutters, pinning her to his desk and unbuttoning her shirt: “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

Sex and smoking feature to excess in “Marseille”. Perhaps the French writers are catering to what they think Americans expect from a drama about French politics. Yet there is something about the casual indifference of this scene, of no great narrative consequence, that makes it unusually plausible. Five years after the DSK affair—when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF chief and Socialist politician, was arrested on rape charges (later dropped)—France again faces claims of predatory sexism.

This month Denis Baupin resigned as deputy speaker of parliament after claims of years of sexual aggression and harassment (which he denies). Days later Michel Sapin, the finance minister, apologised for inappropriately touching a female journalist. Such caddish behaviour would hardly be rare: parliament, nearly three-quarters male, sometimes echoes like a farmyard. One opposition deputy clucked like a hen (une poule is used to mean “chick”) when a female deputy spoke. Others whistled when a female minister took the floor in a dress. “We thought the DSK affair had changed the situation and that macho habits…were heading for extinction. Alas,” wrote a group of female journalists last year in Libération, a newspaper.

What’s the French for “chauvinism”?

Of course, every country suffers from sexism. And France has at least made an effort to combat discrimination. Although women did not get the vote until 1944, today parité, or equal rights, is a national creed. Half of government ministers are female. Electoral rules require party lists to be made up equally of men and women. Next year a quota will require women to make up at least 40% of big companies’ board members.

What makes France different, though, is a tolerance of sexual entitlement, mixed with complex codes about femininity. Like Italians, the French have traditionally treated male seduction as part of the political game. Infidelity by public figures is seen as normal, and disapproval as a puritan obsession of uptight Americans or northern Europeans. No French president has been hounded from office for sexual dalliances, including the current one, who was photographed heading for a tryst on a scooter. Both the wife and the mistress of another, François Mitterrand, attended his funeral, to general indifference.

Moreover, even some women ridicule the notion that commenting on their appearance is sexist. France, after all, values elegance and aesthetics in all corners of life, whether of cakes in a pâtisserie window, or neatly polished nails. Admiring a woman’s look is not always meant as a sexual advance. Nor is a feminine dress sense—the Christian Louboutin heels, the Dior silk skirt—automatically interpreted as a statement of sexual availability.

French law defines sexual harassment with apparent clarity. In practice, however, the rules are far from clear-cut. The cultural celebration of femininity in France, deplored back in 1949 by Simone de Beauvoir in “The Second Sex”, blurs the lines and complicates judgment. There is a self-censoring culture of silence over predatory behaviour.

A younger generation, however, is not so indulgent. This month 17 female former ministers, from left and right, declared that the “taboo and law of silence” was no longer acceptable. Women need to overcome their fear that society will judge that “they were asking for it”, says Caroline de Haas, a young French feminist. Even if codes of seduction in France make it difficult to decrypt certain words or gestures, argues Clémentine Autain, a feminist politician, one phrase is unambiguous: “No means no.”

For a country that launched post-war feminist theory, France sometimes seems to be fighting yesterday’s feminist battles, and not just in politics. Corporate France, too, has its share of womanising chancers, as well as clubbish male practices. Only one CAC40 firm, Engie, is run by a woman. In America this might prompt a debate over whether the problem is female assertiveness (see Sheryl Sandberg) or corporate demands (see Anne-Marie Slaughter). In France the discussion is stuck on chauvinism.

Yet, if drawing the line between harassment, prejudice and Gallic charm makes France a complicated place to be a professional woman, it is also in other ways one of the most supportive in Europe. France stands out for its policies on working parenthood. On weekday mornings Paris’s sidewalks throng with tiny children, one hand clutching a comfort blanket, the other tucked into that of a besuited parent. They are off for a long day at école maternelle, or nursery, which the French state provides free to all children. Over 99% of three- to five-year-olds attend nursery, the highest rate among OECD countries apart from Malta.

France’s pro-natalist policies, historically inspired by the need to breed soldiers to keep Germany at bay, guarantee Scandinavian levels of spending on family benefits and crèches. Train travel is subsidised for big families. Generous paid holidays, and the cult of the month of August, help mothers, too.

As a result, far more mothers of small children work full-time in France than in Germany or Britain, all professional categories included. By actively supporting working motherhood, France makes it easier for women to stay on the career ladder after childbirth, even if statistics show they still do most of the housework. In short, between good child care and infuriating male chauvinism, French working women have both the best and the worst of it. Which is not quite the same as having it all.