KAREN STRUNG
Sylvie Paycha and Karen Strung
As for my mother, she went to university for nursing but later did a master in theology and became a minister. It’s also an unusual path. (...) In her generation there were very few women ministers. It was only some 7 or 8 years before she started her studies that they had let women become ordained. Ministers formed a boys’ club then, and she told me that she was the first woman minister in every church that she got a position in.
I noticed that there was no woman on the list of speakers for one of the conferences, so I suggested that we try to find one. As a matter of fact, for this particular conference I had even heard him ask a PhD student who had just finished if she would come and give a talk. But she was not listed, although she had been invited. Having at least one female speaker per conference isn‘t really asking for much. But he refused and I didn’t want to attach my name to the conference if we were not to include women. He then asked me to take my name off the organising committee.