Don’T Forget To Exchange Your Leftover Kronas Before You Leave Iceland

As a president, Vigdís was vastly popular — she was reelected thrice and served in office for sixteen years. In office, she promoted the education and empowerment of ladies, the funding and celebration of the humanities, and the safety of Icelandic nature. She also oversaw a handful of legislation that made these targets potential. After her presidency, Vigdís shaped the Council of Women World Leaders in 1996, and it remains right now one of many UN’s leading foundations promoting female empowerment and gender equality around the globe.

Iceland is understood for its robust women — and we wish you to turn out to be certainly one of them! Travel in the footsteps of highly effective Icelandic women throughout the nation’s history, getting to know figures from the time of settlement within the 9th century till fashionable instances. Amidst leisurely outdoor activities, you’ll hear women’s stories every step of the best way.

Revisiting The Gender Pay Gap In Europe

In numerous different scenarios, Iceladic women can simply live merrily withtheir boyfriends in civil conjugal relationship and likewise come to the stage of official occasion after their little ones are literally born. But, as with every nation, there may be nonetheless work to be accomplished in direction of the aim of full equality, and never all women are equally represented in Iceland’s progress. The #metoo movement has helped present that Iceland nonetheless has a systematic imbalance of power between the sexes. Just this yr, a big group of foreign women in Iceland started organizing to focus on their experiences of gender-based mostly discrimination and advocate for change.

One yr later, Iceland handed a Gender Equality Act outlawing gender discrimination in employment and education and established a Gender Equality Council to implement the regulation. Vigdis Finnboggadottir, the first female president of Iceland, attributes both her electoral success and her willingness to run for office to Women’s Day Off.

Women’S Suffrage

As a single mother and divorcee, Vigdís stood for women’s independence and did so unashamed. That her lifestyle contrasted with what was customary on the time not solely shocked the world but launched Iceland to new ideas of womanhood and freedom.

Flights have been canceled, the telephone service was shut down, newspapers weren’t printed, faculties closed, financial institution executives needed to work as tellers to keep the banks open, and men had to deliver their youngsters into work. Iceland has been a leader within the informal Friends of 1325 Working Group, which lobbies for the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security resolutions inside the UN.

In 1983, the Women’s Alliance shaped with the goal of presenting feminine candidates for political office. This increased to fifteen% after the first elections in which the Women’s Alliance participated. By 1999, 35%, of MPs had been women, and the 2016 elections noticed this grow to forty icelandic woman eight%, the best proportion of female MPs in Iceland’s historical past. During this era, insurance policies and laws were adopted on parental go away, violence against women, gender-based mostly budgeting, and extra.

Today, Iceland is means in advance of various other nations with regard to intercourse equal rights and also feminist movement. They’ re thus ahead of time that it’s even named as the greatest country for functioning women. In the previous, icelandic women was actually not therefore well-known vacationer destination. It was truly a relatively unfamiliar nation, generally checked out by vacationers who were looking for an journey.

And of course, trans-women are nonetheless combating for full rights and acceptance in the legal system and society at massive. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was the first democratically-elected female president in Iceland from 1980 to 1996.

The same yr, impressed by women´s rights and feminist movements everywhere in the world, the “Red Stockings”, movement was based and was a key radical pressure in raising awareness on various gender equality points. Organizers used word of mouth, television, radio, and newspapers to raise consciousness, and ninety % of women took half, including those in a number of the most remote components of Iceland. As a end result, many industries were pressured to shut down for the day.

Iceland has comparatively excessive levels of gender equality and institutional protections for girls’s rights. Although Iceland does not have authorized protections to ensure women’s political participation, women make up more than 40% of elected representatives. However, women’s illustration decreases in historically masculine Ministries corresponding to Foreign Affairs, and in management roles within the Icelandic Crisis Response Unit.