It will take place on Tuesday, for equal pay and against gender-based violence: women will not go to work and will not help at home, the Prime Minister will also take part
A one-day strike against the gender pay gap and sexual and gender-based violence is planned for Tuesday in Iceland. Thousands of women and gender non-conforming people have signed up, and it represents a disruption to both paid and unpaid work, including domestic and family care work that often falls to women. Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir will also join in, saying she wants to “show solidarity with Icelandic women.”
Tuesday’s strike is the result of a major political effort involving more than 30 organizations and is expected to be the largest women’s strike in the country’s history. The largest demonstration will take place in the capital Reykjavik, with others taking place in a dozen other cities.
According to the World Economic Forum’s annual gender gap report, Iceland has consistently been the country (among the over a hundred countries analyzed) that has come closest to gender equality over the past 14 years. However, strike organizers pointed out that in some professions the pay gap between men and women is still 21 percent and more than one in three women have experienced gender-based violence in their lives.
Regarding the pay gap between men and women, Iceland has had a law since 2017 that requires companies and businesses to certify that the salaries of men and women are equal for the same work tasks. However, the organizers of the strike are demanding that salaries in the sectors where women employ the majority, such as care and cleaning, be made public: according to the data, these salaries would be significantly lower than those in other comparable sectors and are among the lowest the labor market, which would contribute to women remaining in a state of economic subordination compared to men.
Linked to the discussion about economic discrimination is the discussion about sexual and gender-based violence. Drífa Snædal, one of the organizers, told the Guardian that “violence against women and low-paid work are two sides of the same coin and influence each other.”
There have been several women’s strikes in Iceland in recent years, but the last all-day general women’s strike took place in 1975. At that time, around 90 percent of women in the country gave up their work for the so-called kvennafrí (women’s day off). This provided the impetus for the adoption of some fundamental reforms. Five years later, in 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir became Iceland’s first female president and the first woman in the world to be democratically elected head of state.
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On October 24, 1975, 90% of Icelandic women went on strike for equal rights and pay. They stopped working, cooking, cleaning, and caring for their children, bringing the nation to a virtual standstill. The men faced major challenges. Supermarkets sold out quickly… pic.twitter.com/yjc0yuPvAa
— Historical Videos (@historyinmemes) September 16, 2023
“Iceland is called a paradise of gender equality,” said Freyja Steingrímsdóttir, one of the organizers of the strike and spokesperson for the BSRB, the largest public workers’ union: “We have to make sure that we live up to these expectations.” The slogan of Tuesday’s strike is actually Kallarðu þetta jafnrétti? (“You call that equality?”). Steingrímsdóttir also explained that women and non-binary genders were involved in the strike because “we are all fighting against the same system, we are all under the influence of patriarchy.”
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