"He comes up to me, puts his finger on my breast": at Air France, the macho corporate culture on autopilot

Since the outbreak of #MeToo , she has been feverishly awaiting the moment when the shockwave would finally shake the company and loosen tongues. After the avalanche of testimonies collected from flight attendants who had been victims of sexist and sexual violence (SSG) by Radio France's investigation unit four months ago, Alice*, a cabin manager at Air France, thought the time had finally come for this collective awakening.

The lifting of the veil on the extent of VSS cases within the airline, the degrading remarks targeting female employees, their normalization, and the aggressors' sense of impunity—all facts highlighted by an audit report dated September 2024 and currently being investigated by the labor inspectorate—could not, in her eyes, fail to cause a shock. It was a cold shower for someone who, in her thirty-year career, has never been able to come to terms with the omnipresent sexist climate in her daily professional life.

A cabin chief who repeatedly sticks his penis in the back of a flight attendant mid-flight, harasses her during a stopover, but escapes sanctions from management; a steward who grabs another's breast in a hotel room while the pilot jeers... the testimonies are edifying. And yet. "When the revelations came out, it was: "Move along, there's nothing to see." A colleague flatly denied the problem when I brought it up. In fact, he didn't care. It wasn't his business. Most people here still can't put into words what's going on," Alice analyzes.

"We can no longer...