These aren’t the wives of powerful European leaders. They themselves are some of the most powerful leaders in Europe and Scandinavia.
This is what progress looks like.
Allow me to introduce you to the defense ministers of Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany.
At a security conference in Munich on Saturday, politicians from around the world gathered together. When Belgium’s male defense minister spotted these four ladies sitting together, he snapped this photo. A Tweet by Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert — the Dutch defense minister — with the photo quickly went viral.
Hennis-Plasschaert told The Guardian:
“[The Dutch politician] Neelie Kroes once said to me that old boys’ networks are the oldest form of cartels we have in Europe. She was right, but things are changing, and women can do similar things now.”
Hennis-Plasschaert, 40, is famously quoted as saying:
“[…] it doesn’t matter if you have a willy or not” and denies women have a common way of doing politics, or even a common experience of becoming politicians, purely because they are all women.
“I don’t think the military officers that we work with see us any differently than if we were men,” she said. “And if they do, they don’t show it. But there is a public debate about women taking more influential political roles, and that’s healthy.”
From The Guardian:
To many, the image heralded a new era in which even the last bastions of male privilege were no longer closed to talented women. Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, retweeted it with the comment “True Power Girls” (and was widely criticised for the condescending tone).
