I felt the need to take a picture of this aberration and post it on Instagram as a legacy of the past, but last Thursday, a photo of the scene at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem was not much different from the Beraud painting in Paris, as if 129 years had not elapsed. There they were, ramrod straight, standing next to one another in similar suits: 22 men surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the most powerful woman in the world, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The businessmen were invited to attend an exhibition on innovation and a roundtable discussion as representatives of the ground-breaking high-tech field. The men, like the Parisian intellectuals in the painting, represent progress. They too are totally blind to the fact that in practice, they are outmoded. The photo, which was meant to glorify and promote the crown jewel of Israel’s economy, unwittingly laid bare something else entirely – the banality of erasing women from the most important arena that there is, the centers of power. [...]
The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s apology in the face of growing protests on social media over the absence of women in high tech in the picture demonstrates the magnitude of the problem: “The roundtable at which Merkel participated was part of a series of events organized in cooperation with a number of entities, including the Israel Export Institute, the Innovation Authority, the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office,” the Foreign Ministry said. “The companies that were invited are leaders in innovation from Israel and Germany. … They selected and sent their representatives. In the course of the preparations, the shortcoming of the absence of women among the representatives was not identified.”
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