Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir joined tens of thousands of women in the island state in refusing to work this week in protest at the gender pay gap and gender-based violence.
The Tuesday walkout – called ‘kvennafrí’, or women’s day off – marked the first full-day women’s strike since 1975.
According to the BBC, women and non-binary people were urged to refuse paid and unpaid work yesterday, including household chores.
Prime Minister Jakobsdóttir told the media ahead of the protest: ‘I will not work this day, as I expect all the women [in cabinet] will do as well.’
She said her government was looking into how female-dominated professions were valued, in comparison to fields traditionally dominated by men.
The BBC notes that Iceland has been ranked the best country in the world for gender equality by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for 14 years in a row. But the country is not completely equal, with the WEF assigning it an overall score of 91.2%.
Around 90% of Iceland’s female workforce went on strike in 1975, seeking to highlight the importance of women to the economy. The strike prompted the country’s parliament to pass an equal pay law the following year.
Former Icelandic president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir told the BBC in 2015 that the 1975 strike was ‘the first step for women’s emancipation in Iceland’, which paved the way for her to become the first woman to be democratically elected head of state in the world, in 1980.
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