This, I thought, would be an interesting press conference. The Pompidou museum in Paris, the one with the coloured pipes on the outside, was going to announce a major exhibition on women artists -- a worthy PC event made public just on the heels of International Women's Day.

When I arrived, late, one of the curators was busy explaining to a crowded and mostly-feminine auditorium that the museum planned on making this a benchmark event in gender history. Not only were they going to hang works by women artists but also invite big names in feminist theory and feminist literature to expound on women in art and photography and sculpture and video etc etc...

The exhibition, titled elles@centrepompidou, was to last for a year and be a sort of "works in progress."

It all sounded good, but then the panel of dignitaries sitting on the platform -- three men, each in charge of a key institution, and two women who were mere curators -- offered to take questions and the fun started.

Why had the Pompidou museum chosen a cosmetics company as its sponsor? (that was Yves Rocher, a 50-year-old French company that sells fairly cheap close-to-nature products, acting as patron of the arts with the museum for the very first time)
The head of the firm, who didn't seem ready for this feminist line of questioning, came out with something like "our brand never stereotypes women", which triggered a lot of giggles in my corner of the hall.

Then another journalist got up to say she couldn't believe the museum thought it was putting on an avant-garde show, she thought it was way behind the times. "Surely it would be more appropriate to hold an exhibition where half the artists were women and the other half were men!"

And why, said another journalist, had they chosen the title of "elles" which in French is the feminine of "they". "If it had been an exhibition of purely male artists they would never have called it 'ils'".

If the Pompidou centre truly had a gender policy, chipped in another woman, why were only 17 percent of their works produced by women artists?

And why was it still male-dominated, like most French museums -- the proof in the pudding being the two men on the platform who run one of the country's top museums.

At least, one of them said, we have works by women artists, not the case of their sister museums, the Louvre and the Orsay immpressionist museum, who show only men.

And so it went, on and on, a great free-for-all funny feminist moment, with the men in the dock, quietly and with all due respect, saying: "but we are the first museum in the world ever to have done this".

The expo, which involves the Pompidou showing works by women from its own modern and comtemporary collection, the biggest in Europe, starts May 27. There will probably be lots more lively debate between now and then which may see the PC institution regret its bid to do right by gender.

In this blog, reporters and editors for global news wire AFP blog about the news they report and the challenges they face covering events from Baghdad to Beijing, the White House to Darfur. Claire Rosemberg is AFP Lifestyle editor in Paris.