Icelandic women are going on strike Tuesday, and Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir doesn't plan to be an exception. "I will not work this day," she told mbl.is, adding that she doesn't expect female cabinet members to work either. This will be the first full-day women's strike since 1975, the year before Jakobsdottir was born, the BBC reports. Women and non-binary people have been urged to refuse to do paid or unpaid working, including household chores. The strike has been called to protest the persistent pay gap and high rates of gender-based or sexual violence.
Iceland is considered a global leader in gender equality, ranked first by the World Economic Forum for 14 years in a row, but women are still paid around 21% less than men in some professions and more than 40% of Icelandic women say they have experienced gender-based or sexual violence, the Guardian reports. "Iceland is talked about, like it's an equality paradise," says Freyja Steingrimsdottir, one of the strike's organizers."But an equality paradise should not have a 21% wage gap and 40% of women experiencing gender-based or sexual violence in their lifetime. That's not what women around the world are striving for."
An equal pay law was passed the year after the 1975 strike, which around 90% of the country's women took part in. The strike was "the first step for women's emancipation in Iceland," Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who became the country's first female president in 1980, told the BBC in a 2015 interview. (More Iceland stories.)
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