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October 24 is a historically significant date. On this present day in 1975, ninety % of the women in Iceland did not go to work.

Meeting Icelandic Women Through Social Media

A girl and two girls are seen in conventional gown as Icelanders celebrate the Icelandic National Day in Reykjavik, Iceland on June 17, 2016. Around 100 Icelanders collect after marching through the streets of Reykjavik, protesting towards sexual and gender-based violence.

For years now it’s been the international frontrunner on problems with economic equality. This was simply affirmed by the World Economic Forum’s most recent Gender Gap Report – Iceland comes prime within the rating of a complete one hundred forty four international locations. The world’s first democratically elected female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, led Iceland for four phrases from 1980 to 1996. Today, Iceland is arguably probably the most progressive nation on the planet in terms of ladies’s empowerment. Like a era of Icelandic women who had been impressed by Finnbogadóttir’s election, Tómasdóttir was acutely aware that, win or lose, there was nice value in the example of running for political office.

It’s an echo of the early Norse period, when divorce was merely executed by either person declaring their intent in front of witnesses and women might marry several occasions, with rights to half an property. This perspective is a factor in the apparent lack of bile in Icelandic divorces, where fighting over property is less likely given a person’s financial status just isn’t valued to the same extent as nations with a more capitalist tradition, like Australia or the U.S.

• According to unions and ladies’s organisations, this means in every eight hour day ladies are basically working with out pay from 2.38pm.
• “I was heartened to hear the information out of Iceland, “ mentioned Anne Hedgepeth, Vice President of Public Policy and Government Relations for the American Association of University Women.
• Her election to workplace was an enormous step in the right path for Iceland, whose attitude in regard to the LGBTQIA+ group changed dramatically from hostility to tolerance and celebration.
• Some had been quick and concise with their solutions, while others took time to elaborate and turned their interview into soul-bearing conversations with me, a stranger.
• While Iceland has had equal pay legal guidelines in place since 1961, the brand new standard is seen as the primary time that the small and affluent nation of about 340,000 has put in place specific steps to attempt to pressure companies to remove pay gaps.
• France24.

So when your plane lands in Reykjavik and you first set foot on Icelandic soil, the completely different perspective is a bit of a tradition shock. A place which has topped the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index yearly for the final seven years and that the Economist named the world’s greatest place for working ladies, is certainly not your greatest destination for submissive, old school ladies. The Icelandic authorities has by no means offered grants to immigrants for marrying Icelanders, regardless of gender. The fable that Iceland would pay $5,000 month to foreigners keen to marry their ladies has been going around the Internet for some time now.

I decided to connect with them on to get their reactions, and find out how they thought their workplaces may change. I also talked to experts from the United Kingdom and the United States to find out if Iceland’s authorized precedent could lengthen to other countries.

She founded Iceland’s first Women’s Society, and its first girls’s magazine, Kvennablaðið, which became a political tool to inspire girls to demand voting rights. She additionally served for a time on Reykjavíok city council. Throughout her life, Breit wrote numerous articles advocating for girls’s rights and by no means let her voice go unheard; she usually held speeches in downtown Reykjavíokay, which always drew crowds and open ears. In 1907, she founded the primary ladies’s suffrage society in Iceland, called Kvenréttindafélag Íslands (it still exists at present). But Breit didn’t stop there.

The ladies walked off the job at 2.55pm, a symbolic time after which they are technically not paid, as women in Iceland – a country famend for its gender equality – earn solely seventy four per cent of the typical male wage, according to Iceland Statistics. It is true that there are a handful of girls’s rights campaigners amongst us, however there is considerable doubt whether the motion they have been trying to launch has taken root in the minds of Icelandic women.

Even with this drop in representation, Iceland did go on to elect the second girl to function prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, on the end of 2017. The former President of Iceland, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, has acquired the WIP Award for Lifetime Achievements in Female Political Empowerment tonight in Reykjavík, during an award ceremony with feminine Parliamentarians from all around the globe who met for the first time in Iceland. “The Icelandic girls are position models on the planet, and we’ve to live with that” said the lady who was the primary elected Head of State in the world.

On Monday, women throughout the country went on strike to protest the persistent gender pay gap, which presently stands at 18 %. “To completely close the gender pay gap in Iceland, we need handle bigger, social issues.

As talked about earlier than, Icelanders proved fairly liberal in their views in direction of ladies’s suffrage. The robust women’s political movement in Reykjavík seems, nonetheless, to have put concern into the hearts of many parliamentarians.