The Icelandic Woman / Book

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Gender-based mostly Violence Against Women of Foreign Origin

In Iceland’s capital city of Reykjavik, women make up nearly 40 % of Parliament. Give credit to a strong girls’s movement and laws designed to improve gender equality at work and home. I assume Iceland has a historical past of sturdy women, since the girls must stay at residence while the lads went out at sea after which the women had to have the ability to fully deal with their farms on their own. Take care of the animals, do repairs, deal with the youngsters, clean, prepare dinner and so on – and quite often their husbands and/or sons would die at sea, so that they’d be left to proceed on their own. The Icelandic authorities has pledged to shut the gender pay gap by 2022. And the women of the country proceed to be extremely organised and socially conscious; an astonishing one- third of Iceland’s girls are members of a Facebook group – paradoxically named Beauty Tips – during which they actively talk about gender points. The solidarity that the Icelandic women’s motion built in the Seventies and the Nineteen Eighties laid the inspiration for welfare insurance policies that have liberated women within the nation in some ways. Icelandic ladies work extra on the typical than different women in Europe. Still they’ve more children, are very lengthyölived and, based on an internationnal survey, live in a country that may be a total paradise for girls. 24 October, 1975 , Women of Iceland “Took the Day Off,” bringing the country to a standstill and changing historical past by way of the collective power of women united. This 12 months, and for the following three years, the Government and Parliament of Iceland will function co-hosts to the Women Leaders Global Forum (WLGF), together with Women Political Leaders (WPL). This unique forum attracts ladies from politics, businesses, academia and civil society to share ideas and options that assist construct better societies and promote gender equality. The must be unbiased is by some means deeply encrypted into the Icelandic girls’s psyche and persona. Maybe it’s shaped the Viking Age or perhaps it’s from the time that their men were all out at sea and so they wanted to take control, but no matter the explanation it’s nonetheless, today, very present. The Nordic nation’s progressive attitudes towards women have given it a lot to boast about. It was the primary nation to democratically elect a female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, who came to power in 1980. The present prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, who was elected in 2017, is the second woman in that place in Iceland’s history. Iceland has also handed a raft of legislation geared toward lowering pay inequality, ensuring women are higher represented on the highest ranges in business and guaranteeing shared paid parental go away.

  • You might need guessed it by now that similar to other gender issues, feminine sexuality just isn’t taboo in Iceland.
  • The Icelandic nation has all the time been very open to women having authority and duty.
  • Halldór Ásgrímsson introduced his intention to resign on 5 June 2006 following the celebration’s poor leads to the 2006 municipal elections.
  • An all-female political get together – the Women’s Alliance – was established.
  • My era was born into an atmosphere of girls’s liberation.
  • In 1970, tens of 1000’s of women had protested on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

If you need to impress them, being a doormat isn’t your technique. In truth, you possibly can method meeting Icelandic girls as you’ll networking at an expert event. Icelandic women can come across as a bit too full of themselves, particularly to foreigners. So when your airplane lands in Reykjavik and you first set foot on Icelandic soil, the totally different angle is a bit of a culture shock. A staggering 90 % of Iceland’s female inhabitants turned out for the 1975 protest. Instead of calling it a strike, which might have alienated the nation’s more conservative ladies (“as a result of to go on a strike was a very leftie thing to do,” mentioned Ómarsdóttir), the day was called Kvennafrídagurinn, which means “women’s day without work,” an idea all ladies may get behind. Much of the progress that Iceland has made may be credited to a powerful ladies’s motion, which has propelled the demand for gender equality into the mainstream in a nation where ideas of male dominance and set gender roles have deep roots. I wrote a blog in regards to the Icelandic MP that breastfed her baby during congress (but I disagree along with her utterly on what she was addressing in congress) and about Miss Iceland who give up a magnificence pageant after being told she had to go on a diet. Halldór Ásgrímsson announced his intention to resign on 5 June 2006 following the party’s poor results in the 2006 municipal elections. The coalition remained allied with the Independence Party chairman, Geir H. Haarde, as Prime Minister. The Progressive Party chief Jón Sigurðsson was Minister of Industry and Commerce, until a coalition of the Independence Party and the Social Democratic Alliance took over after the elections in 2007. This is a hearsay persisting since 2016 as a result of several faux news articles and Icelandic girls are frequently being inundated with friend requests from strangers on Facebook. The teacher began training other academics throughout Iceland. Just over a decade later, gender research courses are being provided in around half of high colleges and are mandatory for college kids in three high faculties (which can not sound a lot, but that’s nearly 10 % of all Icelandic high schools). Iceland’s advances in gender equality present the facility of grassroots activism to push for higher illustration and the influence of laws to ensure commitments are met. But they’re additionally reflective of the country’s very specific political and social culture. For comparison, the United States came in 51st final yr, sandwiched between Mexico and Peru. Iceland also persistently performs properly in The Economist’s “glass ceiling index,” which rates the most effective nations for working women. It positioned first within the index in 2016 and third in 2018 (the U.S. got here in 19th). Change occurs in small doses, however someone needs to be the one to start.

Iceland election could propel radical Pirate celebration into energy

Within 5 years, the country had the world’s first democratically elected feminine president – Vigdis Finnbogadottir. Now in her 80s, this steely-eyed powerhouse tells me of the impact that day of protest had on her personal profession trajectory. An outpouring of women on to the streets was, by then, a nicely-trodden form of activism.