Women across Iceland — including Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdóttir — went on strike Tuesday to protest against gender inequality and gender-based violence.
Tens of thousands of Icelandic women and nonbinary people are reportedly taking part in the historic strike, which seeks to bring attention to pay inequality and violence against women in the island nation of 380,000 people.
Workers across several industries — from education and healthcare to the nation’s top cabinet — walked off their jobs and joined the 24-hour “kvennaverkfal” (“women’s day off”) strike.
Schools, television stations and museums are among the organizations affected by the strike. The protest is being led by trade unions from across Iceland, a country where about 90% of workers are unionized.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered across the country. In a protest in the capital Reykjavik early Tuesday afternoon, the president of the Icelandic Nursing Association, Guðbjörg Pálsdóttir, led the crowd in chants of “F–k the patriarchy,” Icelandic news website mbl.is reported.
“It’s dangerous to be a woman — and it’s even more dangerous to be a woman of foreign origin, a woman with a disability, or a trans woman,” Pálsdóttir said.
The 24-hour demonstration is being billed as the largest gender-specific strike in Iceland in nearly 50 years.
In October 1975, about 90% of women refused to work in a protest against workplace discrimination. That strike led to the passage of the Gender Equality Act, the objective of which was to “prevent discrimination on the basis of gender and to maintain gender equality and equal opportunities for the genders in all spheres of society.”
However, though the World Economic Forum has ranked Iceland as the world’s most gender-equal country for the last 14 years in a row, Jakobsdóttir says Iceland has not yet reached its “goals of full gender equality.”
“We are still tackling the gender-based wage gap, which is unacceptable in 2023,” she said.
With News Wire Services
