Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees (born Heleen Nijkamp, 1968) is a Dutch opinion writer, economist, and lawyer. Involved with politics and public policy in the Netherlands and the US, she has also taught at universities in both countries.

Biography

Mees graduated in Economy and Law at University of Groningen. From 1992 to 1998, she worked for the Dutch Treasury in The Hague, for two years as spokeswoman for former State Secretary Willem Vermeend. She then worked for the European Commission in Brussels from 1998 to 2000. In 2000 she emigrated to the US, where she changed her surname from Nijkamp to Mees.

In New York Mees was initially employed as a European affairs consultant for Ernst & Young. When her contract was not renewed, Mees stayed in New York and worked as an independent consultant on European affairs. Mees also started writing opinion pieces for several Dutch newspapers.

Mees' breakthrough as an opinion writer (she is credited as a third wave feminist) in the Netherlands came in 2006 when she wrote "The time is long overdue that women should go to work", her first feminist opinion piece in NRC Handelsblad. The same year, she co-founded Women on Top, an organization that until 2011 advocated more women in top jobs. As a firm advocate of female ambition and a promoter of more women in the supervisory and executive boards of big companies, Mees has been described as a "power feminist".

From 2006 to 2010 she wrote a bi-weekly column in NRC Handelsblad, and from 2012 to 2013 a weekly column for Het Financieele Dagblad. She has written for publications such as Foreign Policy and for Project Syndicate In September 2015 she was a guest columnist for de Volkskrant, and in 2016 began a biweekly column for that same paper.