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!")
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?
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...
I suppose the decisionmaker needs to know what societal values one has to uphold, and in which order of importance. As a wild example, if the group had demanded the women walk around in the nude, because of their religion, it'd be obvious to say no because it'd violate so many of the employees' values.
What if the Hindus had said "we are vegans, please don't serve us meat" - probably reasonable enough, although I seem to recall some rightwingers getting angry about some other occasion where only vegetarian food was to be served.
Yeah, as a host I'd be fine with meeting their dietary restrictions; but would refuse their with staff gender restrictions. Somehow the management company didn't know where this acceptability border lied.
And the Elites tut tut at people voting AfD and Le Pen.
These %$%#@& are fuelling the far right.
Facepalm!
Curious what those conclusions will be.
So to shake your head and think "Woke Europe" would be too simplistic.
In this case equality between men and women, but let's not pretend that for most ideologies that is any more than just one of many inequalities they would like to introduce. Sorry, "to have respected", as if that means anything different.
As others have pointed out though this probably isn't relevant for HN