Sorry girls, but there will be no rolled up trouser legs or dodgy handshakes for you for the foreseeable future as France's top Masonic order has voted against allowing women to join its 250 year old organisation.

At their annual meeting of the Grand Orient de France, sixty percent of the 1,200 delegates attending rejected outright the proposal that was put forward by their slightly more liberated Grand Master Jean-Michel Quillardet to allow women to join their Lodges.

Monsieur Quillardet had put forward the proposal as a way of 'changing the image of freemasonry in France', he went on to say that he thought the results were encouraging as only a few years earlier the vote would have been around 90 percent against.

The GODF is one of the biggest Masonic orders in France boasting around 48,000 members and was founded in 1773. Ironically their website slogan reads Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and they claim that the search for progress has always been the force behind their reflection and activities.

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