The head of the company that runs the Eiffel Tower will step down at the end of the year after female employees were kept away from a visiting Hindu religious delegation, the company said on Tuesday.
Patrick Branco Ruivo, the director general of the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, is leaving after an investigation by an independent firm found a series of operational failures around the Sept. 5 visit. Those failures, the company said in a statement, resulted “in female staff being excluded from the visit that day, an unacceptable situation.”
Mr. Branco Ruivo was appointed at the end of 2018. The company did not say who would replace him.
The trouble became public two days after the visit, when the tower closed on Sept. 7 because of a staff strike. A union official called the management instructions behind the walkout unacceptable. According to employees, managers had told them that female workers should not come into contact with the delegation from Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, a worldwide religious and civic organization within the Swaminarayan branch of Hinduism known as BAPS. The group had been in the Paris region for celebrations marking the inauguration of a traditional Hindu stone temple.
BAPS said the exclusion was never its idea. The group “never requested that female employees be hidden, removed or excluded from the visit,” it said in a statement to The Associated Press.
“The religious practices of our monks were explained to the Eiffel Tower’s management in advance,” the statement said. “These are personal spiritual commitments, which our monks observe without seeking to impose them on others. They do not require women to be excluded from the places they visit.” The group did not describe what the monks’ practices are.
Ariel Weil, the operating company’s chairman, said on Tuesday that he had asked for measures and training programs promoting gender equality to be put in place.
The Eiffel Tower, which is 330 meters tall and draws about 7 million visitors a year, has been shut by strikes before. In February 2024, employees walked out for six days over demands for better maintenance of the 137-year-old landmark and for higher wages.