Erindi Katrínar Jakobsdóttur forsætisráðherra á viðburði jafnréttisnefndar Evrópuþingsins í Brussel 3. mars 2022

International Women‘s Day

Theme: An ambitious future for Europe‘s women after COVID-19: mental load, gender equality in teleworking and unpaid care work after the pandemic.

I would like to start by thanking you for the invitation and for this timely discussion.

Before starting my formal address, allow me to join other speakers and express my sincere support for Ukraine, and my deepest sympathy for those who have lost their lives, their families and loved ones.

It is tragic beyond words, that the horrors of war have returned to Europe. 

Iceland condemns in the strongest possible terms Russia´s invasion into Ukraine.

I commend the broad international solidarity that has emerged - we must continue to put pressure on the Putin regime to immediately stop this war.

This military aggression – like every other – is essentially an attack on ordinary people, on innocent men, women, and children.

Our thoughts are with the ordinary citizens of Ukraine – our duties are towards them.

And because we are talking about gender equality today it is very important that gender equality should always be on our agenda, even at times of war. We should think about gender equality and let´s not forget that peace which is really the pre-condition of every progress we can make is essentially connected to gender equality. I think the world would be a more peaceful place if we had more women in the lead, I have no doubt that.  More women in the lead, that should be our common goal here.

COVID-19 has engulfed our societies for the past two years. We have dealt with the global health crisis as well as the social and economic crisis. The effects of the pandemic have been different for women and men, impacting gender equality; furthering pre-existing inequalities and highlighting among other things what we have known for a long time but have not been able to address in any serious way:

That the inequalities that women face in the labor market and in relation to their daily lives are multi-layered and reach far beyond the well-known pay-gap discussion. These include unpaid care work, carrying the mental load, having less savings and fewer benefits.

When the pandemic forced us to work from home we saw that most of the people who were not able to do so were women working in caring. We also saw many of the women who did work remotely increase their burden of unpaid work in the home.

Today´s discussion is only a part of the beginning of continued conversations and analysis, and I give my praise to this committee for the initiative. As we start to build back up after the pandemic, let us realize the opportunity we have to make changes towards greater gender equality. We need to address how care work, paid and unpaid, relates to the fundamental changes that are happening to the way we live and work. And we must adopt policies that ensure a just future of work for all genders.

Now, you have spoken very nicely about Iceland and gender equality, but I can assure you that gender equality in Iceland does not come from nowhere. We have a long history, we have a very strong tradition of women who have fought for every step in gender equality. Nothing has happened by itself, everything has happened because of women´s solidarity making those steps.

And because I have a background in literature, I like to refer to literature and actually my speciality is crime fiction, but Icelanders are more famous for their medieval Sagas and interestingly they are full of female characters who refuse to be dominated.

One such is Þórhildur, the poet from Njáls saga, who is married to a chieftain and warrior but is said to be very “difficult”. Have you heard that one before? The difficulty is that she keeps making jokes and this finally leads to their divorce when she composes a two-line satirical poem about her husband´s habit of staring at teenage girls in other people´s weddings. His stated reason for the divorce is that he cannot stand the constant comedy. Neither the author nor the other characters approve of his behavior although, like many men in our age, he gets away with it. Þórhildur was well rid off him. 

And this is actually the long thread of the fight for gender equality which we have in Iceland. And presumably you all have these characters in your culture and they have had a strong impression on Icelandic women.

I was born in 1976. The year before I was born we had what was called a “Women´s Day Off” or “Kvennafrí” in Icelandic. Around 90% of women in Iceland went on strike in 1975. They just walked out of their working places.  And this we did again in 1985, 2005, 2010, 2016 and 2108. We leave work the minute we stopped getting paid, compared to the men, illustrating the gender pay gap in a symbolic way.

We have seen the gender pay-gap diminishing in the last years in Iceland but it hasn´t happened by itself. It has happened because of women´s solidarity. When I grew up we had a very strong grassroot movement in Iceland called the “Red socks”, who really brought gender equality to the forefront of the political discussion. We had an all women´s party founded in 1983. In 1982, when I was six years old, there were only 3 women members of Parliament and that didn´t change until the all women´s party was founded. They got candidates in the Parliament and then the old parties started to make their change within their parties. But we needed an all women´s party to have that change happen. Today we have around 48% women and 52% men. But this didn´t happen by itself.

We are told that Kvennafrí felt like a revolution. The history of the fight for women’s rights is a story of many revolutions, some small and others bigger. But it is safe to say that these women laid the groundwork for many of the policies that have made Iceland so successful when it comes to equal participation and representation.

The Women’s party fought hard for things we now find self-evident in our country, such as universal child-care and paid parental leave. In their time, they of course met strong opposition. But now everybody thinks that this is what makes our society prosperous and successful.

And this fight never ends. I have now been prime minister since 2017, just in that time we have made many amendments to increase gender equality, changing the laws on abortion, prolonging the parental leave which is split between each parent, they take 6 months each and if the one parent does not use the six months it loses it. What we have seen is this legislation has changed the attitude of fathers. First when this legislation was put in place in 2000 we did not see many fathers taking parental leave. Now Icelandic fathers do that and they feel very positive about it. In this we have seen a political policy being turned into legislation which has changed a mainstream attitude in society. And this legislation comes from the grassroot movement.

And now I will talk about gender equality after covid.

In spite of milestones in Iceland we haven´t reached our goal in gender equality. We see men disproportionally in charge in areas of finance and investments. We see far too few women in the top positions of our largest companies. There is still a big gender-gap when it comes to funding and investments in startups and innovation, which needs to change.

However we are always taking these small steps. I would like to mention an important step that was taken in 2017 and 2018, when we implemented a ground-breaking equal pay law. With it, Iceland became the first country in the world to require employers to obtain equal pay certification, ensuring equal pay for equal work.

Surveys show that the equal-pay law has made decisions around salaries within companies more transparent and transparency is the key to equal pay. As a result increased workers trust in the fairness of such processes.

In 2020, a new comprehensive law on gender equality was implemented, including a first ever provision on multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. This law ensures better protection for the most marginalized individuals, including women of foreign origin and women with disabilities who are especially vulnerable when it comes to the inequalities of society.

A new Act on Gender Autonomy has been adopted in Iceland, giving people the right to determine and define their own gender.

Significant steps were taken when the Icelandic Parliament adopted two anti-discrimination laws: the Act on Equal Treatment in the Labor Market and the Act on Equal Treatment irrespective of Race and Ethnic Origin. 

We´ve also been combating hate speech and hate crime both through extensive awareness raising and with a bill to amend the General Penal Code to include a provision on hate crime and provide more groups with protection against hate speech, including people with disabilities and intersex persons. 

Dear colleagues.

During the COVID-19 pandemic we have seen serious challenges in relation to gender equality emerge worldwide.

The Icelandic government, like governments in Europe, made many measures to mitigate the economic and societal effects of the covid pandemic. We decided that gender equality should always be part of every decision we would make throughout the pandemic.

Throughout the pandemic and lockdown periods, we saw how women were generally under more stress due to increased care and home responsibilities.

Sadly, as I mentioned earlier, the pandemic only exposed and exacerbated pre-existing disparities. We know that women generally carry out more household tasks than men, and it also increased burden of what is called in Iceland the third-shift: Remembering family birthdays, arranging after-school playdates, signing up for gymnastics and football practice, remembering birthdays of pets, feeding the pets, buying cough medicine because you can sense an oncoming fever, making sure that everything works. So it is not just about putting the laundry in the washing machine but remembering everything to make the family and the home, work.

This load falls disproportionately on women. They are also more likely to hold front-line, stressful, low-paying jobs, where the rewards do not equal the risk. Women are more likely to perform basic service work where they are therefore more exposed to infection.

Women working in the healthcare sector are generally in closer proximity with patients than men. Such gender division within the health sector is well known and the same pattern exists globally.

One of the things that I think mattered during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iceland was the fact that the minister of health, for most of the time, was a woman and also the director of health. So therefor the issues of gender equality became a natural part of our responses.

We decided to examine the health of Icelanders from a gender and equality perspective, and whether healthcare providers took the different needs of women and men into consideration.

We also made the decision not to impose lockdowns on pre-schools and compulsory schools, youth centers or sport clubs to limit the social impact and societal effects of our pandemic restrictions. We emphasized that services for survivors of violence should remain open. We established a special task force to coordinate actions against violence, with a special focus on women, children, and other vulnerable groups. Because gender-based violence was a problem before covid but what we expected was to see a surge in domestic violence during covid. I think making these pre-emptive measures was very important.

As we are getting closer towards the end of covid it is important to observe what really happened. And what we have seen during the time of the covid-restrictions in Iceland is that reported cases of rape dropped significantly – in 2020 rape reports decreased by 43%. And why was that? It was because our covid restrictions included pretty heavy restrictions on bars and nightclubs, and it seems clear that the way we “party” has a huge impact on women’s safety. With this in mind, my government has put in place a special program aimed at preventing these types of crimes, we want to do everything we can to make sure sexual assault crimes do not increase again. And this may be a lesson learned from covid now that we are reopening our bars and clubs without restrictions.

We may have to just face the fact that domestic violence was a problem in Iceland before covid and continues to be a problem. Now firstly, I must say that Iceland is a peaceful country and we don’t have a lot of violent crimes but here are some striking numbers. Since we changed our protocols in dealing with domestic violence crimes in 2014, making amendments on how we deal with domestic violence, it is very interesting to see that the number has gone from 20% of all violent crimes in 2014 to 50% in 2020.

This is due to changes in definitions, changes in registration, and changes in how cases are handled, mainly in that they are investigated immediately and social services are called to assist survivors at the scene. The way we deal with these crimes is still evolving and it is one of the great contradictions that gender-based violence should be as common as it is in a country with such good gender equality. But perhaps it is due to our gender equality that these crimes are reported as much as they are and we consider them to be in fact, crimes and not just part of normal life. This is a change I have felt in my lifetime. Domestic violence was not considered a crime when I was kid.

Now I could mention many things that we have been working on how we can ensure speedier and better quality investigations, prosecutions in cases of gender-based and sexual violence as well as in cases of human trafficking. During the UN Women Generation Equality Forums, Iceland has prepared a comprehensive framework outlining 23 commitments to end all forms of Gender Based Violence by 2026. These we intend to fulfill.

As I mentioned before we launched a high-profile awareness-raising campaign against domestic violence during covid. I sincerely hope that this awareness program has had some positive results. 

The main thing is as we see it, ending gender-based violence is a prerequisite for achieving full gender equality. There is no gender equality when women are not safe. While we still have gender-based violence we still have very deeply rooted inequalities.

I think it is crucial that we continue to monitor how the covid pandemic effects men and women differently. I think what we are going to learn from this pandemic is the fact that women´s participation in policy making and decision making is the key. I also think that we need to learn that governments must support activists and grass-roots organizations, listen to their experiences, and incorporate their ideas into their decision making. Doing this is a indivisible part of the fight for equality and social justice for all people. To conclude I don´t think we would be here in this discussion on gender-based violence with out the Metoo movement that came from women that spoke up. This grassroot movement has influenced the policy making in Iceland in a very positive way. The responsibilities of politicians is to use this type of force from the women´s movement to achieve to goal of gender equality.

Thank you.