Women and non-binary people in a general strike for gender equality in Iceland
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ruv.is
The gays rights movement was able to make a lot of progress by having a clear-cut case where marriage and its benefits where legal for mixed-sex couples and illegal for same-sex couples. They were being denied something that many others enjoyed. Do women in Iceland have a different pay-scale than men? Are traditionally male house-chores like yardwork paid, while house cleaning is not?
The primary goal here is to get the uncorrected pay gap down to 0%, it is now around 10% in Iceland. Highly paid positions such as CEOs are almost exclusively held by men while woman majority occupations tend to be underfunded and are suffering from austerity. I think the demand is that majority women occupations will be valued the same as majority men occupations, both monetarily and societally.
A secondary goal, according to the organizers, is sexual violence which is a major concern in Iceland. Quite often sexual crimes are not investigated by the police, and if they are the court system is lacking in punishing for these crimes.
Finally they also want equality in the home (what they are calling the third shift) that child caring and house choirs would be equal responsibility among every adult member of the family. Recent polling in Iceland seems to suggest that women take a disproportionate responsibility of child caring and home choirs, as well as a larger hit over men to their professional when raising a child
For those unfamiliar with these terms, the uncorrected pay gap is just the raw difference between men's and women's pay. So men and women being paid perfectly equal in the same job, but women picking jobs with less pay results in an uncorrected pay gap despite equal pay for equal work.
I'm not sure how this is going to happen unless A) the government severely restricts people's work options so that each field has 50/50 gender ratios, or B) deliberately unequal pay for equal work is introduced to counteract women's choices of employment (so paying a man less for doing equal work, to make up for the fact that women tend to prioritize work life balance and safety over salary).
In many feminist theories the pay-gap and patriarchy are tightly coupled, you can’t get rid of one without the other, so many feminists tackle the patriarchy directly. I personally go a little further and tackle capitalism among these (as do many other feminists; though not as visible in today’s strike).
In my mind the only reason it seems impossible to close the uncorrected gender pay gap is that the capitalist class are majority men, and our capitalist system will unfairly and unevenly take the profits generated from workers (many of whom women) and steer them towards the bosses and shareholders (most of whom men).
I think the organizers are thinking something similar, except they didn’t state the anti-capitalist part out loud. Dismantling the patriarchy means stopping this system where men are the owner and shareholders and hold all the power in government and among the business elite. For some—e.g. the Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, who was also striking today—this may mean bringing women to the top, but for many of the organizers this probably means bringing the men at the top down, among the system which favors them.
Which is more fair:
* A society where boys and girls are told they can't study in the field of their choice because of their gender because the government wants equal representation.
* A society where boys and girls are free to study whatever they want, and are given equal pay for equal work.
Rather the focus is on removing systematic barriers which hinders certain careers from being valued as much others. It isn’t a coincidence that CEOs are being payed a ridiculous amount of money despite not contributing all that much, while nurses have to suffer austerity after austerity with their paycheck mirroring.
These are examples of systematic barriers which feminists wish to remove. I know very few (probably none) feminists which are asking for equal representation among CEOs, rather they want CEOs to be valued for what they are, and instead the profit going to the workers.
The corrected pay-gap isn’t a big deal in Iceland. I think they’ve even stopped measuring it because it was deemed a distraction from the equality that most people actually want. Instead some feminists in Iceland actually want to go in the other direction and look at the total wage gap (which also takes into account unpayed lost work).
This strike in particular is not payed by the unions, but rather it is assumed that employers also want the same thing (equal pay) and participate by giving the striking workers their salary. Most actually do, but there are some that don’t. If you think you know the type of business that won’t give striking women their pay when they are fighting for equal pay, even when most businesses do, you are probably correct. So the organizers are actually planning on publishing a shame list (isl. Tossalist) naming the employers who don’t value gender equality, effectively exposing their pink-washing. I think the hope is that exposing them will make it easier to push them into doing better,
Estimates for the crowd downtown were 100k people which I think is something like 4x over people’s expectations earlier in the week. Not counting any other gathering elsewhere.
[1]: https://www.statice.is/publications/news-archive/inhabitants...
If that many people support the changes, couldn’t they just vote for them? I can’t imagine that fully 75% of the non-striking 66% would turn out to vote against whatever changes the strikers are proposing
Furthermore, Iceland has held the 1st position on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap report for 14 consecutive years [1], so it's not like things are really bad compared to the rest of the world.
This strike is primarily to draw attention to the fact that the rate of change has stalled, and that needs to change.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-gender-gap-repor...