Reviews

Top 100
most influential Dutchmen 2007
category scientists and thinkers

Mees is seen as the only hard-boiled Dutch feminist under forty. While the vast majority of Dutch women cycles back and forth between a part-time job and the school gate, Heleen Mees rolls up her sleeves and lashes out at the families with one-and-a-half breadwinners. In her pamphlet No more part-time feminism! Mees criticizes the preference for motherhood and lack of ambition in Dutch women, who can’t get enough of breastfeeding and other domestic minutiae. Bring the children to the crèche and involve the men in childcare so that there is room for Women on Top, as the platform Mees co-founded is called.

Heleen Mees works as a consultant European Union affairs in New York and flies ceaselessly across the Atlantic to fulfil her mission in promoting emancipation in Europe. As a self-professed opponent of glass ceilings and the old boys’ network, Mees and colleague Neelie Kroes strive together for forty percent representation of women on company boards. A suitable quota for top jobs. It is not clear where that amount of women will be found. The question is whether Mees will be the last in a long line of illustrious predecessors that includes Joke Smit and Hedy d'Ancona, or the first of the long-awaited third wave feminists. The future of equality feminism rests on the frail shoulders of Heleen Mees.