Women in Iceland including PM go on strike for equal pay and an end to violence

Schools, shops, banks and Iceland’s famous swimming pools shut on Tuesday as women including the prime minister went on strike to push for an end to unequal pay and gender-based violence.

Icelanders awoke to all-male news teams announcing shutdowns across the country, with public transport delayed, hospitals understaffed and hotel rooms uncleaned.

Trade unions, the strike’s main organisers, called on women and non-binary people to refuse paid and unpaid work. About 90% of the country’s workers belong to a union.

Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir said she would stay home as part of the strike and expected other women in her cabinet would do the same.

Iceland, a rugged volcanic island of around 380,000 people just below the Arctic Circle, has been ranked as the world’s most gender-equal country 14 years in a row by the World Economic Forum, which measures pay, education, health care and other factors.

No country has achieved full equality, and there remains a gender pay gap in Iceland.

Tuesday’s walkout, running from midnight to midnight, was billed as the biggest since Iceland’s first such event on October 24 1975, when 90% of women refused to work, clean or look after children, to voice anger at discrimination in the workplace.

In 1976, Iceland passed a law guaranteeing equal rights irrespective of gender. Since then there have been several partial-day strikes, most recently in 2018, with women walking off the job in the early afternoon, symbolising the time of day when women, on average, stop earning compared with men.

Iceland’s schools and the health system, which have female-dominated workforces, said they would be heavily affected. National broadcaster RUV said it was reducing television and radio broadcasts for the day, and reported that only one bank branch in the country was open.

Gatherings of support were held across Iceland, the largest in Reykjavik, where much of the capital’s centre was closed to traffic and tens of thousands gathered on the grassy Arnarholl hill for a rally.

“We have not yet reached our goals of full gender equality and we are still tackling the gender-based wage gap, which is unacceptable in 2023,” Ms Jakobsdottir told news website mbl.is. “We are still tackling gender-based violence, which has been a priority for my government to tackle.”

Her cabinet is evenly split between male and female ministers, and nearly half of legislators in parliament are women.

But while women in Iceland have pushed or broken the glass ceiling to top jobs — from bishop to leaders of the national wrestling association — the lowest-paying jobs, such as cleaning and child care, are still predominantly done by women.

The work, essential to Iceland’s tourism-dominated economy, also depends heavily on immigrants, who on the whole work longer hours and have the lowest salaries. Around 22% of the female workforce is foreign-born, according to Statistics Iceland.

“Foreign women are more vulnerable,” said Alice Clarke, an artist and designer from Canada who has lived in Iceland for 30 years. “Hopefully what is being done today will help to change that.”