Iceland Women Strike: History Repeats as 48 Years Ago, Same Protest Happened Against Gender Pay Gap – All You Need to Know

In a historic move, women in Iceland assembled for a mass protest where even the Prime Minister decided to join and not work for a day. Here is why.

Schools, shops, banks and Iceland’s famous swimming pools shut on Tuesday as women in the volcanic island nation — 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 organizers, called on women and nonbinary people to refuse paid and unpaid work, including chores. About 90% of the country’s workers belong to a union.

Today we repeat the event of the first full day women’s strike since 1975, marking the day when 90% of Icelandic women took the day off from both work and domestic duties, leading to pivotal change including the world’s first female elected president of a country #kvennaverkfall pic.twitter.com/hBnSPSfahG

— MFA Iceland 🇮🇸 (@MFAIceland) October 24, 2023

Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdóttir said she would stay home as part of the strike — “kvennaverkfall” in Icelandic — and expected other women in her Cabinet would do the same.
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 Oct. 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, symbolizing the time of day when women, on average, stop earning compared to 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.

WHAT HAPPENED 48 YEARS AGO?

Iceland’s 1975 strike inspired similar protests in other countries including Poland, where women boycotted jobs and classes in 2016 to protest a proposed abortion ban. In Spain, women staged a 24-hour strike in 2018 on March 8, International Women’s Day, under the theme “If we stop, the world stops.”

Spain’s acting equality minister, Irene Montero, said Tuesday that the 2018 strike was inspired by Iceland’s 1975 walkout and expressed full support for the latest protest. Since 1975, women have staged several hours-long strikes, but this is the first full-day action. The 1975 ‘day off’ saw the participation of almost 90% of the island’s working women. According to The NYT, schools and theaters were shut, and the national airline had to cancel flights as most of the flight attendants were women.

A BBC report said, “Banks, factories and some shops had to close, as did schools and nurseries — leaving many fathers with no choice but to take their children to work. There were reports of men arming themselves with sweets and colouring pencils to entertain the crowds of overexcited children in their workplaces. Sausages — easy to cook and popular with children —were in such demand the shops sold out.”

(With AP inputs)