For lunch, Elin Hyldeen Gartner often meets her colleagues at Gretas, a trendy café in the center of Stockholm. During a sandwich, the women talk about their everyday work - they are pastors in the Swedish capital. In the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the country, women constitute about 40 percent of the clergy.
The photographer Juliette Robert met with the journalist Delphine Bauer twenty pastors, talked to them about their experiences and documented their everyday life - even beyond the job: she shows them shopping, at a coffee chat with colleagues or while walking with friends.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sweden has around 6.1 million members, with around 10 million inhabitants living in the country. For a long time women had to be content with the office of deaconess, in 1960 the first women were ordained as pastors. At first there was considerable resistance. "When I studied theology, most boys were shocked to see me in their ranks," says 72-year-old Caroline Krook, former bishop of the diocese of Stockholm, who was ordained in 1969.
Women had to fight hard to be accepted. It was also this challenge that motivated Eva Brunne, Bishop of Stockholm since 2009, to become a pastor: "We wanted to change the church from the inside out, we were the only ones who could do that, everything was very rigid and conservative . " Since the eighties, it does not matter if a pastor presides over the church.
According to the photographer, the clergy also no longer believe that clerics are no longer regarded as authority figures but that they are more sensitive. "The women have helped change that," says the photographer. "The society in Sweden has developed strongly in recent years and has become more open, so the role of the pastor has also changed."
In the higher levels of the church hierarchy, however, men are still mostly among themselves - a large proportion of the current bishops are male. "But that will hopefully change," says Robert.