Are Iceland’s women right to strike?

Oh to be in Iceland yesterday. I would not have been writing this, I wouldn’t have had to put the bins out, walked the dog, phoned the pest control man because the moles are back again, swept the leaves piling up or be preparing a roast for my husband who is about to return from an arduous overseas trip.

Instead I would have woken up with my Icelandic sisters-in-arms to watch or listen to all-male newscasters announce that total chaos across the volcanic island: school closures, public transport grinding to a halt, hotels with bedrooms left uncleaned and hospitals running skeleton services. In other words, a national nervous breakdown caused by women withdrawing their labour.  

Welcome to Iceland’s Women’s Day, the day when tens of thousands of women stop – voluntary and housework as well as paid work – in protest against the gender pay gap and gender violence. It’s not quite a strike, more of what the Icelanders call a “kvennafri” or “kvennaverkfal”. That translates as a women’s day off – and has been organised by women’s organisations, LGBT groups and the trade unions. As 90 per cent of all Icelanders are a member of a union, they are particularly powerful in whipping up the workforce to strike.

Unsurprisingly, Iceland’s Prime Minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, leader of the Left-Green Movement who heads the four party coalition government, also downed tools for the day in solidarity with the gender cause. Nor did Jakobsdottir, (the daughter of Jakob), expect the five women in her Cabinet of 12 to work either or indeed female MPs who make up nearly half of Iceland’s Althing, one of the oldest parliaments in the world. 

As you would expect from the Vinstri party, the PM herself is a strong advocate of erasing the gender pay gap. In an interview with the Iceland Monitor website, mbl.is, ahead of the strike, Jakobsdottir agreed that “there is still some way to go to achieve the goals of equal pay for the genders and that this is unacceptable. I am first and foremost in this to show solidarity with Icelandic women.” 

She went on: “As you know, 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.”

Yet the paradox is that Iceland is seen as the world’s equality paradise. It is rated on several indexes as one of the world’s most gender-equal countries – although I’m not convinced it’s possible to measure such arbitrary criteria. According to the World Economic Forum, Iceland has come out top of the world for the last 14 years with the WEF assigning it an overall score of 91.2%. The wage gap between genders is much smaller than most other countries, partly thanks to 2018 legislation which declared that companies with more than 25 employees must provide equal pay for equal work – or risk daily fines.

Iceland also comes out first in terms of female political empowerment. In 25 of the last 50 years, the country has had a woman as head of state and 48% of MPs are female. Women in Iceland secured the right to vote in 1915 – behind only New Zealand and Finland but it was only in the late 1970s and 1980s that the number of female MPs started rising, and that’s mainly because of the Red Stockings movement which was behind the first Women’s Day Off.

Iceland’s more egalitarian society shouldn’t come as any real surprise: the population is tiny – there are 376,056 Icelanders – and they are a homogenous and hard-working people, either of Norwegian or Celtic descent. Of the total population, 86,000 foreign residents – mainly Poles – live there and 10 per cent of the population are first-generation immigrants. 

Adding to this homogeneity is the unusual spirit common across all the Nordic nations of more “equal” relations between men. Who knows whether this is serendipity or a reflection of their historical circumstances – abolition of aristocracy, smaller populations, tough living conditions because of geography and weather. But what is evident is that the drive to even out differences of pay and conditions for men and women started early: in Iceland, the first Women’s Day protest was held on October 24, 1975, way ahead of most European countries. The former Icelandic president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir told the BBC in 2015 that the 1975 strike was “the first step for women’s emancipation in Iceland.” This, she said, paved the way for her to become the first woman to be democratically elected head of state in the world in 1980.

What is striking about this latest women’s day off, however, is that it has shown how dependent the country is on the female workforce in two main sectors: education and healthcare. The walk-out hit healthcare and education the hardest as women dominate both areas of work, making up around 94 per of all kindergarten teachers while 80 per cent of workers at the National University Hospital of Iceland are women.

Which prompted me to wonder, if Iceland’s women all took the day off to sit at home or go out on the streets to protest, who looked after the children when they weren’t at school? So who did the housework and fed the children? Their fathers surely couldn’t take the day off as they were running the country in the absence of the women.

Doesn’t that go to the heart of the gender pay gap? That it is still a question of sex – and not gender – because it is women who have the children, and who will, even when they are at work, be the ones who have to stay at home when children or indeed elderly parents are sick?

It’s why the gender pay debate is often a trivial one, and should be looked at on a case by case basis rather than as some sort of prototype ideological barometer of equality. Surely what women want (and indeed men wish for their womenfolk) is to work in satisfying and well-paid jobs, with equal access to opportunity rather than outcome.

The reality is that most women do choose work like teaching and healthcare which tend to be the lower paid jobs in society, mainly because these are workplaces which give women more flexibility in their schedule to be able to also look after their children and their home. These are also professions which do tend to appeal to women’s more innate and softer characteristics, that of caring and nurturing. And before the gender equality crowd starts jumping up and down and having a hissy fit, I repeat that it is a biological fact that more women than men tend to demonstrate these tendencies, not all, but more. 

Away from the nonsense about comradely solidarity and gender equal pay, there were a couple of quotes in Jakobsdottir’s interview which suggest she knows where the real problem lies. She acknowledges that the wage gap is growing again, particularly in the state sector.  This has prompted her government to investigate four specific areas of the public sector – schools and health in particular – to see what more can be done. She also said – and this is the big giveaway – that the government is looking into how the so-called women’s professions are valued in comparison to traditional men’s professions.  

That surely is the point. Teaching and healthcare have typically been seen as softer areas of work, and that is why in the pecking order of the pay hierarchy, the reward is less than in other more high-profile work. Start valuing teachers and nurses more and you might find that the number of men joining the profession will increase too. 

And now I must go and and peel those potatoes for the roast.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life