François Hollande has been mocked and accused of sexism after he created a new ministry of family, children and women’s rights in his reshuffle of the French government.



“Hollande forgot the sewing and ironing,” tweeted the rightwing opposition MP Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet as critics raised serious concerns about the ministry’s joint mission, accusing the French president of relegating women’s affairs to the family and domestic sphere.

The campaign group Osez Le Féminisme said lumping together family, children and women was “retrograde”. The feminist activist group Femen France said: “Hey guys, you forgot cooking and cleaning.”

Danielle Bousquet, head of France’s high council for gender equality, which was set up by Hollande at the start of his presidency, issued an alarmed statement, warning: “Is this not locking women into a stereotyped role that has been assigned to them for centuries: that of wife and mother?” Bousquet, along with two other politicians working on equality issues, demanded clarifications and assurances of the government’s commitment to women’s rights and gender equality.

Under pressure, the new minister for family, children and women’s rights, Laurence Rossignol, who is herself a leading feminist in the Socialist party, was forced to reiterate her engagement for equal rights.

“I will continue to be a feminist with a modern vision of the family and women’s issues,” she told Monday’s Courrier Picard. She said she would engage positively with critics of the new ministry. “But I think the threat hanging over women is not the fact that they’re referred back to the home sphere, it’s that we don’t take into account the fact that once at home, responsibilities are unequal, whether a woman is alone or with a partner,” she said.

The row is damaging for Hollande, who was elected four years ago promising he was a feminist who would champion gender equality. When he first came to power he appointed a high-profile minister for women’s rights, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, resurrecting a role which had been absent from French politics since 1985. But that post was later downgraded and now, although returning to a fully fledged ministry, it has been lumped together with the issues of family and children in a way that Laurence Parisot, former head of the business leaders’ union, said was “an affront to all women.”

Hollande also promised equal numbers of men and women in government and his new reshuffled cabinet achieves that. But since the justice minister Christiane Taubira quit the government over policy differences last month, the key four ministries – interior, foreign affairs, justice and defence – are now all held by white men. A few women are in certain powerful ministries – such as Vallaud-Belkacem, who is now France’s first female education minister – but many women’s posts are in junior ministerial roles.

Hollande’s election and promise to focus on feminism came as French society was talking more openly about sexism, harassment and equality in the wake of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal. Strauss-Kahn was arrested in 2011 in New York over the alleged attempted rape of a hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo. Criminal charges against him were dropped by prosecutors, and he later settled a civil action with Diallo, but French political reaction to the case sparked soul-searching over issues of rights and equality.

With just over a year until the next presidential election, Hollande has been accused of playing to right wing with the new ministry. The equality group Les Effronté-e-s said: “Once again, as was the case under the right, the state is assigning women to the themes of family and children.”

A rightwing lobby for traditional family roles has remained in place in France since the large street-marches opposing Hollande’s legalisation of same-sex marriage in France in 2013.

A documentary broadcast last month about the terrorist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo showed Hollande had deliberately taken only male advisers with him when he went to the police cordon, with the implication that he felt women needed to be spared or protected and should not go.

The new reshuffled French cabinet also has a junior minister for “real equality”, whose remit has not yet been fully explained but which is said to go beyond gender rights to broad structural issues such as housing equality and inequality between mainland France and the overseas territories.