Do French women need special credit cards?

Société Générale is following in the footsteps of Bred and now has a “toute nouvelle collection de cartes bancaires dédiée aux femmes: la collection pour elles.” If you sign up for this card you get perks such as picking the look of your card (design options are floral, water drop and diamond), €400 towards purchasing a new purse if yours is stolen AND up to €300 is covered if you have a water leak, broken window or electricity outage and need a repair person to come out and fix the problem. I’ve been here nearly five years and I’m still amazed that stuff like this goes on. Are women really signing up for these cards? Who are they and what century do they live in?

credit card for women

It's probably difficult to read the posters in these photos, I noticed them for the first time on the way to work this morning. When I saw them again at a different Bred branch near the office, I had to take photos. Bred bank is offering a credit card called Bred Affinity that is "La premiere carte bancaire dédiée aux femmes" (or loosely translated the first credit card specifically for women). From a quick glance at the site, I can't tell what the big difference is between this card and existing credit cards other than the designs, but since I know I won't be getting one any time soon I don't have the patience to look deeper. This new card plus my recent women are becoming men experience exemplify the (not so) subtle differences between the US and France when it comes to gender and what can be done and said publicly. I can imagine the reaction if an American bank tried something like Bred’s credit card for women. Lawyers would start filing lawsuits before the ink on the posters dried....

pharmacy or the sorbonne?

I went by the pharmacy to pick up a couple of prescriptions I had dropped off Saturday and when I entered, the (female) pharmacist was speaking with a customer about how women had become like men and years ago something like this never would have happened and today people have no souls. I patiently waited my turn and gave her my slip for the prescriptions. She continued babbling about people buying guns (or something along these lines, I was only half-listening), while I tried a couple of times to tell her that I needed to purchase an additional item. I kept thinking “Just shut up, get my stuff and tell me how much I owe already.”

She lowered her voice even though there was no one else around, other than the two (men) employees and told me that a woman motorcyclist had run over a pedestrian just in front of the pharmacy and kept driving. I responded with what I thought was an appropriate eyebrow raise and said “ah, bon?”. The woman looked at me while one of the other employees commandeered the computer for something. I could tell that she was waiting for my outrage to come pouring out at the unbelievable idea that a woman, a WOMAN (insert gasp) could do something so heartless.

Getting into a long French philosophical conversation about how the genders were no longer distinguishable according to behavior, was really not high on my things-I-must-do list. As I stood there I had a couple of thoughts running through my head 1) how do I get out of this quickly without seeming rude and 2) this is a large city, why is a hit and run such a catastrophe, just because it was a woman driving. Shouldn’t the anger be because any human would just drive off?

Part of me considered using the “I’m foreign” route to try to escape but I wasn’t really sure how to insert that without coming off as an insensitive idiot since obviously Ms. Pharmacist believed that anyone and everyone should be upset at this story. So I just stood there. I guess she got the idea that I didn’t want to talk and rang up my order. I think next time I might go to the other pharmacy down the street. They aren’t as friendly but I can get out much faster without trying to figure out some culturally correct conversation escape…