Iceland is usually touted for its gender equality, topping the World Financial Discussion board’s gender hole index for 14 years, however girls throughout the nation are set to strike this week in a protest towards employment inequality and the gender pay hole.
The deliberate motion is anticipated to happen Tuesday and can see these from each paid and unpaid jobs take to a picket line, with Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdóttir telling media she too plans to take part and needs her workplace to do the identical.
It’s the primary time in additional than 50 years the nation has seen such a transfer, with girls and non-binary people happening their first full-day strike in 48 years. An analogous strike in 1975 noticed 90 per cent of the nation’s girls cease working to protest the inequality girls face within the workplace, together with pay — a continuously raised subject not solely in Iceland however throughout the globe.
“Whereas vital strides have been made for the reason that pivotal Girls’s strike in 1975 … the core demand for valuing girls’s work stays unmet,” stated Freyja Steingrímsdóttir, communications director for the BSRB, the Icelandic Federation for Public Staff, in a press release to International Information on Monday. The BSRB is likely one of the organizers of the strike.
“The strike, beneath the slogan, ‘You name this equality?’ seeks to carry consideration to persisting gender disparities and the pressing want for motion,” she stated.
International Information reached out to Iceland’s prime minister’s workplace in regards to the deliberate strike however didn’t hear again by publication.
In Canada, girls staff earn about 11 per cent much less per hour than males on common, in line with Statistics Canada in 2021. Current information from Statistics Iceland reveals girls earn not less than 20 per cent lower than Icelandic males in some industries and professions, equivalent to childcare and caregiving.
Steingrímsdóttir additionally stated the strike is to focus on the “urgent subject of gender-based and sexual violence.”
A College of Iceland research in 2018 discovered that 40 per cent of Icelandic girls expertise gender-based and sexual violence of their lifetime.
The strike on Tuesday, Steingrímsdóttir stated, will goal to “showcase our energy and unity” and is a requirement to implement measures to make sure girls’s work is “correctly valued.”
—with recordsdata from Reuters
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