'Women's day off': why women in Iceland are on strike today

Tuesday, October 24, and all the women in a country far north of Europe are called to strike against inequality. A feminist strike with concrete demands.

Iceland, a country known for its snowy landscapes and volcanoes, is the scene of an unusual strike. A women's strike.

The call is for women across Iceland to stop work, both paid and unpaid, for 24 hours. Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir joins the strike, along with two ministers from his cabinet.

Non-binary people, according to The Guardian, were also called to strike.

What Icelandic women demand are pending demands at a global level: that the wage gap between men and women cease (men have, percentage-wise, higher salaries throughout the world) and that violence against them be stopped.

The women's strike in Iceland on October 24 commemorates another historic women's strike that occurred in Iceland on the same day in 1975.

To demonstrate how essential female work is, women's organizations in Iceland called a strike and 90% supported it. Households and important sectors noticed the absence of female labor.

In 1975 it was demonstrated in Iceland that a country's workforce cannot be understood only by looking at men. For example, that October 24, the fish factories, with a predominantly female workforce, had to close.

The Icelandic strike of 1975 inspired the Polish women's strike against abortion bans in 2016, which was named Black Monday.

That Icelandic women's strike was also a precedent for the two international women's strikes that took place in 2017 and 2018.

The strike this October 24 in Iceland raises a question: "Kallarðu þetta jafnrétti ? (You call this equality?)".

Icelandic women's organizations want to make visible how in a country with a reputation for egalitarianism, there are still great inequalities between men and women.

Image: Einar H. Reynis / Unsplash

According to Icelandic feminist organizations, men in Iceland earn (on average) 24% more than women.

And violence against women is a global problem that never seems to end, both in Iceland and many other places on the planet.

Faced with certain reactions against feminism, the women's struggle continues and this struggle takes shape in strikes like the one in Iceland.

It is as simple as equality between everyone being fulfilled in the strictest way.

Image: Lindsey LaMont / Unsplash