AFPDemonstration on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in Paris, November last year
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 17:28
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Frank Renout
France correspondent
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Frank Renout
France correspondent
French women and men are increasingly leaning towards traditional gender roles. And strikingly enough, especially among young people, between the ages of 25 and 34, an old-fashioned division of tasks is emerging again: the man has to work, the woman has to care.
“Sexism is not decreasing, it is entrenched in society and increasing,” writes an important advisory council of the French government, the HCE (Haute Conseil à l’Égalité).
The HCE published its annual report today. “We are seeing a return in society to traditional values,” the report says. The advisory council, among other things, had a large-scale national poll conducted.
Among women, the vast majority believe that above all else they must be “serious, faithful, sensitive and personable” to be taken seriously. More than half of women say that “a good Frenchwoman” has children and puts her family above a paid job.
The vast majority of men believe that they have to have a career and be a breadwinner to be taken seriously. Men should be competitive and sporty. One in five young men thinks it is normal that he earns more than his female colleague with the same job.
Only men and women
The report of the HCE advisory council only makes a distinction between men and women. French people who identify differently were not included in the study.
“Increasingly, the prevailing view is that women should stay at home and be mothers, while young adult men are behaving in increasingly macho ways,” the advisory council said. And that machismo goes far: a quarter of men aged 25 to 34 believe that you can sometimes use violence to command respect.
The change in mentality is mainly a response to feminism, says the HCE. “The more often the public debate advocates for an improvement in the position of women, the greater the resistance to this becomes.”
This mainly affects men, young and old. “There seems to be a kind of passivity, hostility and resistance among men to the emancipation of women.” Of the men surveyed, 37 percent say that feminism threatens the place and role of men in society. About 32 percent of men say they are “losing power.”
Cooking normally every day
But things are also changing among women, including young women. The advisory council points to the global ‘tradwife’ movement: women who profile themselves on social media as ‘happy housewives’ who serve their working husbands.
These groups are particularly large in the United Kingdom and the United States. “Tradwives Hate Feminism and Idolize Trump,” wrote the British newspaper The Guardian.
In the Netherlands, the ‘Girl Army‘ by Thierry Baudet as an equal of the Anglo-Saxon tradwives. The ideas are also making inroads in France, according to the HCE annual report. “More than half of the population thinks it is normal or positive that a woman cooks for the whole family every day,” the HCE said.
Sexism is rife
The advisory council itself is surprised by the social changes, because men and women are increasingly aware of discrimination and sexual violence. Nine in ten French people say that men and women are treated unequally, at work, in terms of salary, in politics or publicly on the street.
“There is a paradoxical gap between what people think on the one hand, and the existence of stereotypical behavior on the other,” the HCE said. The reason for this is that the French have been told all their lives that men and women are different. “Sexism starts at home, continues at school, and explodes online.”
During their upbringing, about three-quarters of girls have to do housework. Among boys this is only 42 percent. In schools, girls are hardly prepared for scientific or technical subjects. Sexism is rife on the internet and social media, but also in traditional media, writes the HCE.
‘Proof of masculinity’
The advisory council will conduct a campaign under the slogan “Put sexism in the garbage!”. On a video shows how men in the 1970s without embarrassment justified violence against women. “Do you think times have changed?” then appears as text on the screen. And then dozens of social media videos from 2023 can be seen in which men say, for example, that hitting women is proof of masculinity.
2024-01-22 16:28:59
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