Do your bit. No matter if you’re male or female. And hopefully at some point all individuals might be treated equally, no matter what they look like, the place they’re from or which gender they are – and youngsters icelandic women will read about unequal pay in class books and discover it as bewildering as the fact that women have been not allowed to ride bicycles – simply earlier this yr, it was frowned upon that girls were using bikes in Iran.

Transparency International, a non-revenue dedicated to ranking countries by stage of corruption, ranked Iceland final February as the most corrupt Nordic nation. And these levels of corruption have been rising since 2012. Icelandic corruption principally takes the form of politicians hiding conflicts of enterprise interest, and politicians’ makes an attempt to pressure and silence the media.

7 Icelandic women who changed the best way we see the world

I maintain hearing locals apologizing about Icelanders being cold and distant, making jokes about the Icelandic stereotype. Honestly, I haven’t seen any of these attributes that they think they possess. It is true, nonetheless, that you must be taught Icelandic if you would like to grow sturdy roots in Iceland. Everyone who has been legally resident in Iceland for six months automatically turns into a member of the Icelandic social insurance coverage system, no matter nationality.

But Breit didn’t cease there. She also served as president from 1907 to 1911, and from 1912 to 1927. Breit modified the best way Iceland considered women endlessly, and in no small half because of her work, grit, and sheer determination, Iceland is now a world leader in terms of women’s rights. We actually, actually wish this was true, but it just isn’t.

The breastfeeding Icelandic MP isn’t the story. What she was arguing for is

It requires the collective action and solidarity of girls human rights defenders, political will, and tools similar to legislation, gender budgeting and quotas. For Icelanders, it’s a source of pride to be the frontrunner in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for the ninth yr in a row.

Jóhanna Sigurðadóttir was the primary feminine prime minister of Iceland from 2009 to 2012. She is thought for pulling Iceland out of a devastating financial disaster, and for being the world’s first brazenly homosexual head of state. Her election to office was an enormous step in the best path for Iceland, whose angle in regard to the LGBTQIA+ community changed dramatically from hostility to tolerance and celebration. Iceland is, in any case, one of many first countries to recognize similar-sex marriage, a move that was spearheaded by Jóhanna’s authorities (she and her companion grew to become one of the first couples in Iceland to have an official same-intercourse marriage). Jóhanna was also Iceland’s longest-serving member of Parliament, holding office from 2009 to 2013.

Other landmarks soon adopted. An all-feminine political celebration – the Women’s Alliance – was established. More women have been elected to parliament; by 1999, greater than a 3rd of MPs were women. An outpouring of women on to the streets was, by then, a nicely-trodden type of activism. In 1970, tens of thousands of girls had protested on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Guðrún Pétursdóttir SDG Heroes photo, first lady Director of the Institute for Sustainability Studies, University of Iceland, carrying her SDG goal: her grandmother’s thimble, SDG #17, «Partnerships for the Goals».

Today Iceland has top-of-the-line records on the planet for feminine political representation. At its peak in 2016, almost 48 p.c of the elected members of Iceland’s Parliament had been women. That determine now sits at round 38 p.c, however it’s nonetheless far above nations just like the U.S. where women make up 23.7 percent of Congress. “We needed to do one thing massive and we wanted to do something bold because our situation was dire,” mentioned Ómarsdóttir, who credit the worldwide women’s movement, including the ladies who marched for equality in New York City in 1970, for uplifting Icelandic women. Perhaps the greatest demonstration of this came in 1975, when Icelandic women took to the streets, offended at not being paid sufficient for their work ― each in and outdoors the house ― and pissed off on the dearth of political representation.

Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir, first woman Minister of the Interior; former Mayor of Reykjavíokay, Co-founder and Chair of the Executive Board of Women Political Leaders, Global Forum

Stop it. The most adequate reasons to elucidate the phenomenon of Iceland women relationship online are their innate curiosity and lack of time.

It is very safe, has a low crime fee, provides equal pay for men and women, offers lengthy maternity leaves for both parents and has had women in almost each leading role. The have to be independent is somehow deeply encrypted into the Icelandic women’s psyche and persona.

Here are only a few examples. People around the world have typically heard concerning the sturdy and independent Icelandic women. Quite usually they’ve also heard in regards to the sexy and delightful Icelandic women – there at all times appears to be quite a lot of international men that just hear the phrases ‘lovely Icelandic women’, which they routinely translate to ‘attractive Icelandic women’ but don’t seem to listen when words like ‘robust, independent and feminist Icelandic women’ come up. Or at least that is what a few of the messages I obtain point out.

And meaning leaving the comfort of our personal little Facebook echo-chambers and speaking to different women across the country with completely different backgrounds and experiences to us. Not least as a result of, nicely, just take a second to assume how freaked out one third of Iceland’s male inhabitants are by that Facebook group. In October 1975, a reasonably spectacular 90 per cent of Icelandic women went on strike for twenty-four hours – refusing to go to work, full any home tasks or carry out any childcare from sunrise till sunset. Instead, they headed to an enormous rally in Reykjavik, whereas all the lads have been presumably left staring in bewilderment at their briefcases and their babies, and wondering whether or not one would match inside the other. And the strike was successful – inside 12 months, the Gender Equality Council had been formed, and the Gender Equality Act made it unlawful to discriminate towards women at work.

In flip it has brought the gender equality debate into mainstream politics and policy-making, away from the margins where it typically resides. During these a long time, women started to take power to outline and redefine the world we stay in and even invent new “truths” from the place they have been standing. Feminism began to infiltrate theology with God known as She by the first lady ever to be inaugurated as a priest in Iceland in 1974, or 974 years after Iceland became Christian and 60 years after it turned legal for girls to serve as priests. Thirty-eight years after that, in 2012, Iceland’s first feminine bishop was inaugurated.

Vigdís served because the fourth President of Iceland from 1980 to 1996. She was actually the world’s first democratically elected feminine president and with a presidency that lasted sixteen years, she additionally stays the longest-serving feminine head of state of any nation. Vigdís is now a Unesco Goodwill Ambassador and a strong spokesperson for the importance of language proficiency. At the University of Iceland, the place she was once a instructor, the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Institute of Foreign Languages bears her identify in honor of her support for research in overseas languages. Sigríður Tómasdóttir is considered Iceland’s first environmental campaigner and instilled a deeply-rooted sense of appreciation for the surroundings in the people of Iceland via her work.

Which is why Iceland have dealt with parental depart really cleverly, by implementing a non-negotiable system the place women get three months depart at 80 per cent of their pay, men get three months go away at 80 per cent of their pay, after which there are three months left over for the mother and father to squabble over and divide up as they want to. And as a result of each single family is given this – and because women can’t get all nine months, even when they ask nicely – most fathers take it. Meaning childcare is rather more equal from the phrase ‘go’. The web site labeled the immigrant invite a hoax, mentioning that according to the most recent inhabitants data, Iceland has a surfeit of men, not women, and the Icelandic government has by no means supplied grants to immigrants for marrying Icelanders, regardless of gender.