Outdated Male Attitudes
I came across this interesting article on the BBC's web site - which features a novel campaigning technique by feminists in France.
Now I think this could really catch on - with women council workers in South Lanarkshire and elsewhere sporting fake beards - to get across a message on equal pay.
It's high time that outdated male attitudes within the council and trade unions - were subject to a bit of good, old-fashioned ridicule.
So you never know - maybe the idea will take off in Scotland as well.
La Barbe: France's bearded feminists
by Lucy Ash
A group of French feminists has found a new way to fight inequality - with sarcastic humour and fake beards. Only rarely is there a violent response.
Colette Coffin unzipped her handbag and pulled out a small piece of artificial fur. "This is my speaking beard," she explains.
"I've got a much bushier one but this has a wider hole so I can talk without getting too much fluff in my mouth."
Deftly, she hooks the string loops around her ears and turns to face me. The effect is bizarre. With the little ginger triangle on her chin, the schoolteacher wearing a prim summer dress resembles a wannabe Lenin.
Ilana Eloit, a political sciences student in jeans, shows me her beard. It matches her long dark hair perfectly but she complains it is "very itchy".
Glancing around, she stuffs it back into her bag under the table. "We don't want to give the game away yet," she says.
As dusk falls, I sit at a pavement cafe in an upmarket neighbourhood in Paris with a dozen members of the direct action feminist group, La Barbe.
The name comes from the group's pantomime style of protest. Its members infiltrate high-level, male-dominated meetings. In due course they get to their feet and silently don false beards before one of them reads out an ironic statement congratulating the men on their supremacy.
The emphasis on facial hair ridicules antiquated male attitudes. "It's meant to be 'ringard'," says Ilana.
"How would you translate that? Maybe 'corny' or 'behind the times'? You see, in the days of the Third Republic, all the great men used to wear big beards. That was the end of the 19th Century but not much has changed in the way many men behave and think in France."
In colloquial French, La Barbe also means "enough is enough". The group includes women of all ages from teenagers to grandmothers. They come from a variety of backgrounds and say they are united by a determination to fight entrenched sexism.
La Barbe was set up four years ago in the wake of the last presidential elections when, for the first time, one of the mainstream parties fielded a female candidate for the top job in French politics.
Ultimately the Socialist candidate Segolene Royal lost out to Nicolas Sarkozy of the centre-right. Now Royal's ex-partner, Francois Hollande, the man she lived with for 25 years, is president.
