“I am confident a woman is forced to be much more professional . . .”

In 1990, she was appointed Deputy Mayor of Yerevan and in 1991 was appointed Minister of Environmental Protection. An environmentalist by vocation, Danielyan realized the importance of her work in the 1980s, when projects for the enlarging of the Nairit plant and organization of regional nuclear waste dumps in Armenia were discussed. “These problems initiated the formation of the environmental movement in Armenia and I am one of its founders. We fought till the end and saved Armenia from the disaster of turning into a cemetery of nuclear wastes,” says Danielyan. The former minister paved a hard way for Armenia when it was threatened by environmental disaster, but the hardships were replaced by disappointments and she realized that those in the high echelons of power didn’t want her to hinder them.

“I later learned the Ministry of Environmental Protection created in 1991 was a formal body and I didn’t manage to change much. They said ‘let Karine do what she does in environment, but let her not hinder us’,” says Danielyan.

But Danielyan has always hindered them, not as a woman but solely as an environmentalist.

“I have not felt any discrimination, but I am confident a woman is forced to be much more professional than the men by her side to escape people saying she is not clever enough… people forgive men their mistakes, but women are not given a right to err,” says Danileyan.

The governmental sessions were the only situations where Danielyan felt uncomfortable as a woman, because the participants were all male.

“I had to be very careful there, for a single mistake was enough to give them an opportunity for saying: ‘well, she is a woman’.”

Still, the most active environmentalist of Armenia believes only women with strong incentive to solve core social issues go into politics.

“Women have many other ways of getting rich, to enjoy life and the hard road of politics is not the best way to do that. I mean women unlike many men come to solve the problems they are concerned with, not to gain power, money and all the pleasures stemming from them. That is the reason they are more people of principle, and more committed to the solution of the problems they face,” says Danielyan.

Discrimination today, she says, is targeted more against intellect than against gender.

“Today intellect is more feminized, which is more typical to transition countries. Girls are much more industrious in learning and more devoted to science. But there is no social demand to include intellectuals into decision-making. If the problem is solved, women will take more decisive positions.”

According to Danielyan the combination and balance of potentials of the female and male in the society and its management should be the same as is the case in nature. Unless the women’s potential is recognized, it is impossible to achieve a full scale development of society.

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