Despite the damp autumn weather, at 2:25\u00e2\u20ac\u2020pm on October 25 some 50,000 Icelandic women and their supporters\u2014nearly one-sixth of Iceland\u2019s population\u2014left their jobs or homes and marched down the main street in Reykjavik. The walkout, called Women Strike Back, was a call for \u201cwomen\u2019s freedom from male violence and the closing of the gender pay gap.\u201d Official statistics show that Icelandic women earn 65.65 percent of men\u2019s average wages. And, as one right-wing city councilwoman texted to her Left-Green Movement colleague S\u00f3ley T\u00f3masd\u00f3ttir, after being chastised for trying to schedule a meeting at 3 o\u2019clock that day, 2:25 pm was the time \u201cwhen we have already worked for our wages\u201d (that is, 65.65 percent of a regular 9-to-5 workday). More a women\u2019s holiday than a strike\u2014most in attendance had permission from their workplaces or were on a school holiday\u2014it was a reminder of the more radical women\u2019s day off in 1975 and a similar walkout in 2005. As Au\u00f0ur Styrk\u00e1rsd\u00f3ttir, director of the Icelandic women\u2019s history archives, says, \u201cNow it\u2019s a thing that Icelandic women do.\u201d<\/p>\n
This walkout happened two weeks after Iceland was officially proclaimed, for the second year in a row, the most feminist place in the world, the top scorer on the World Economic Forum\u2019s 2010 Global Gender Gap Rankings, followed by three other Nordic countries: Norway, Finland and Sweden. Iceland, by 2010, according to the report\u2019s authors, had closed 85 percent of the achievement gap between women and men\u2014proving itself to have more gender equality than 133 other countries measured in the study, including the United States (which jumped from thirty-first on the list to nineteenth).<\/p>\n