What can we learn about building and sustaining a women’s movement from arguably the world’s leaders: Icelandic feminists?

To kick off the season, we’re focusing on Iceland, the country ranked number one for gender equality for 15 years in a row. Together, we explore what makes Iceland unique, how younger generations are pushing the feminist agenda forward, and why limiting freedom around parental leave has increased equality in this volcanic, Nordic country.

 Silja Bára Ómarsdóttir is a Professor of International Affairs at the University of Iceland. Her research includes Icelandic and feminist foreign policy, national security, and reproductive rights. Find out more about Silja’s work at: https://english.hi.is/staff/sbo

Tatjana Latinović has lived in Iceland since 1994, when she relocated there from Croatia. She is a Vice President of Intellectual Property at Ossur, a medical device company. But most relevant to this conversation, she’s a human rights activist, focusing on feminist and immigrant issues in Iceland, and is the current President of the Icelandic Women's Rights Association. Find out more about Tatiana’s work at: https://kvenrettindafelag.is

Disrupting Peace is a production of The World Peace Foundation. The show is produced by Bridget Conley and Emily Shaw. Engineering by Jacob Winik and Aja Simpson. Marketing and Social media by Emily Ruhm. Show artwork by Simon Fung.

Special thanks to Jeremy Helton, my colleagues, Lisa Avery, B. Arneson, and Alex de Waal, and the team from the Tufts Digital Design Studio, including Kimberly Lynn Forero-Arnias, and Miles Donovan.

Find out more about the World Peace Foundation at worldpeacefoundation.org. Follow us on Bluesky at worldpeacefdtn.bsky.social, and on Instagram at @worldpeacefdtn. 

INTRO

Bridget: Welcome to Disrupting Peace, a show about why peace hasn’t worked, and how it still could. I’m Bridget Conley, Research Director at the World Peace Foundation.

Today, it’s clear that the US is backsliding when it comes to democracy and human rights. And it’s not just us. There’s a global shift towards concentrating power in the hands of an ever-smaller group of men – and it's nearly always men – at the top.

So this season, we’re looking at examples of resistance from six countries to see what we can learn. Scholars, activists, and politicians will help us understand how leaders attempt to concentrate power and how people fight back.

To kick off the season, we’re focusing on Iceland, the country ranked number one for gender equality for 15 years in a row. I’ll be speaking with Silja Bowra Ómarsdóttir and Tatjana Latinović. 

Silja Bára Ómarsdóttir is a Professor of International Affairs at the University of Iceland. Her research includes Icelandic and feminist foreign policy, national security, and reproductive rights.

Tatjana Latinović has lived in Iceland since 1994, when she relocated there from Croatia. She’s a Vice President of Intellectual Property at Ossur, a medical device company. But most relevant to this conversation, she’s a human rights activist, focusing on feminist and immigrant issues in Iceland, and is the current President of the Icelandic Women's Rights Association.

Together, we explore what makes Iceland unique, how younger generations are pushing the feminist agenda forward, and why LIMITING freedom around parental leave has INCREASED equality in this volcanic, Nordic country.

INTERVIEW 

Bridget: Silja, Tatjana, welcome to Disrupting Peace.

Silja: Thank you.

Tatjana: Thank you.

Bridget: So I wanna start with looking at key metrics related to gender equality.

For over a decade, Iceland has been ranked number one, the country with the greatest gender equality in the world.

According to the Global Gender Gap Index, which examines women's equality across economics, education, health, and politics. So to put Iceland's ranking in context, I have a brief quiz for the two of you. Silja, I wonder, can you name one of the three non-European countries that also ranks in the top 10?

Silja: Mm. Rwanda. No?

Tatjana: I was going to mention Rwanda.

Silja: They did really well in politics at least.

Bridget: Yeah. The three non-European top 10 are New Zealand, Nicaragua, which I didn't know much about at all. And Namibia, in Africa.

Tatjana: Namibia. Yeah.

Bridget: Okay, Tatjana, your question, where does the US rank? And that's where a lot of our listeners come from. It's not in the top 10, but of the 146 countries ranked in 2024 is the US in the teens, the twenties, the thirties, the forties or the fifties?

Tatjana: I'd say fifties.

Bridget: Yeah, just underneath. We're apparently at 43.

Tatjana: 43. Yeah.

Bridget: And my guess is we may hit in the fifties in the near future.

Tatjana: Yes. Yeah.

Bridget: So, I also wanted to note that Iceland frequently ranks as one of the world's most peaceful countries, and it's one of two countries that do not have a military that we'll be talking about this season on Disrupting Peace. The other one we're looking at is Costa Rica.

But the key point of my quiz was to highlight that by common indicators of gender equality, Iceland is doing great. So Tatjana, I wanna start with you. What are some of the reasons why Iceland ranks so high?

Tatjana: I think we rank so high because of political participation and the reason that we had a woman president for 16 years, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, to really, really drives that courage. So that, I think, gives us a lot of scores.

And we have a woman president now, elected last year. So I think that we will stay in that position. But even by those metrics, which are important, we haven't reached complete equality. We are just not as bad as the rest of the world. But there are things that are not measured and do not fit in those metrics.

Bridget: Tatjana, that's exactly my next question. Um, and I wanted to pose this one to Silja. So take us beyond the numbers. What's the difference between measuring change through metrics and measuring it in terms of transformation?

Silja: The global gender gap report addresses the, the four main issues that you mentioned, but as soon as we start bringing in gender-based violence and sexual violence, Iceland drops significantly. This is one of the, the lagging metrics that we've seen where, where Iceland is not as good as the neighboring countries, for example.

Bridget: People often say that small, Northern European countries like Iceland have more equality because the population is more homogenous. Can you share a bit more about the people of Iceland?

Silja: Yeah. The Iceland I grew up in was, uh, white completely. I remember the first time I saw somebody who had different color skin, and I think I was about nine. And, we share a language, uh, which is spoken uniformly across the whole country.

Everybody my age and, and older, we can all trace our heritage back to the settlers who came here in the ninth century. So we have a very strong national identity. By now, we have a population, immigrant population, or people of foreign background, over 20% of the population.

Some are here for a short time, some are living here permanently and, and have done so for, maybe for decades. And we also had, I mean we're a Nordic welfare society. We've had fairly strong economic equity. We like to consider ourself a classless society.

I mean, we're seeing some cleavages in that I think by now. And the worst thing is that that goes a lot on immigrant and native born differences.

Bridget: Silja, can you say a few more words about what is a Nordic Welfare society?

Silja: A Nordic Welfare Society refers to a society where we have public health insurance, for example. We have public schools which are provided free of charge. We pay very minimal fees for visiting doctors, et cetera. Daycare is universal for children under primary school age, although it is, paid for, out of pocket for parents.

Tatjana: It is, it is subsidized by, uh, municipalities.

Silja: Yeah. So it's a public, yeah, it's a public good. I think the fees are, if you have one child, maybe around $250. Most municipalities. Yeah.

Bridget: A month?

Silja: Yeah. And, uh, we pay high taxes. But when you compare what you get for them, I think it's actually not so much higher than in many other countries. But, we're used to, yeah, having welfare services provided for by the state rather than having to procure them out of pocket.

Tatjana: They have a sort of social safety net.

Silja: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The social safety net. And there's some interesting research on creativity. A woman at the University of Kansas, if I remember correctly, came to Iceland and got introduced to Icelandic music and she thought it was like, oh, the inspiring nature and, uh, you know, like the darkness and the light and whatever.

But, a lot of the people she talked to was like, well, you know, it's easy to be creative when you know your children have, they have daycare and uh, they could go to the doctors and, you know, it's like that, that takes out the big pressures that most of us face.

Bridget: Silja can I just follow up? How much is tuition at the university?

Silja: Uh, we don't have tuition. We have a registration fee. We do have a couple of, uh, private universities in Iceland, but the public universities, we charge about $500 per year, as a registration fee. But it's a public good. Education is a public good in Iceland.

Bridget: Wow. Well, let’s change gears and talk about a policy that gets to the heart of gender equality – parental leave - what has Iceland done?

Silja: What, what Iceland did in 2000, when it established the new framework for parental leave, it was the first to tie a specific share of the leave to the father or now the second parent.

And we saw a huge change in how that affected the status of women and men in the labor market, where all of a sudden men became an unpredictable asset in the labor market, which women had been before because they would carry the children and they had the right to the parental leave. And now employers had to also assume that men would take, and now it's, it's men of all ages because, you know, women age out of - people with uteruses can't carry children after a certain age.

But now men of all ages actually can continue taking parental leave. So now they've become a less stable worker, which means that employers need to consider all people at a more equal level.

Bridget: So how has the policy evolved over the years?

Silja: When the law was passed in 2000, there was a mandatory comment from the Ministry of Finance. Every law that is proposed has to go through the Ministry of Finance that assesses the impact that law will have on the state budget.

And the comment on the parental leave, the conditioned three months of it to men, was that “no foreseeable impact” for the state budget. And turns out it was because the Ministry of Finance did not believe that men would use it. And men, turns out, fathers care about their children.

Tatjana: Yeah.

Silja: And they wanted to take time. And there was a young man, who was in a very high paid position and he had twins and then might be another set of twins, like he had four children in three years. He and his wife.

And he took the full amount of parental leave that he was entitled to, and he and some other men who were in these kinds of salaries, they emptied the fund because there was no cap. You know, even though it was like 80% of his salary was still so high that, then the law was amended, and so now there's a cap of about $6,000 approximately per month. So you, your salary, your income actually drops.

Bridget: And how long is paid parental leave in Iceland?

Silja: So, at the beginning when the paternity leave was institutionalized, and this change was made in 2000, the leave was nine months, three months would go to the mother, three to the father, and three months were to share. And the three months would usually be taken by the mother because their salaries would be lower.

Tatjana: It's always a mother. So few years ago there was a legislation that said that we will extend - the parental leave will be 12 months.

And my organization and some other feminist and labor union organizations were advocating that it should be equally split. So six months to one parent, six months to another parent.

And they can share six weeks out of it. So if the father does not use his six months, they will just, you know, disappear. Mother cannot take it.

And this is a great equality tool in the labor market because when employers are employing a young man or young woman, they sort of can assume that both of them will take a parental leave if they decide to have children.

So it affects the position even of young women that will never have children or they don't pay because they will not be discriminated against.

Bridget: So is it six months use it or lose it for each parent, PLUS an additional six weeks?

Tatjana: No, no, no. It's, no, no, it's not. Six weeks is including this one year.

Bridget: Oh, so it's 4.5 months use it or lose it for each parent, and they get to choose who takes the remaining six weeks.

Tatjana: Yeah.

Bridget: Has there been any resistance to the policy?

Tatjana: Yeah. That's maybe an example of things that people take for granted, uh, young people because there was a pushback by even young people that are in a situation now that have to take parental leave. Some voices were that this government shouldn't be telling people what to do with their parental leave. They should just decide themselves. But we know what would happen then. It would be mothers that would be taking more, in heterosexual relationship, that would be taking more of that time.

Why? Because it's a traditional role of a woman to take care of a baby but also we still have the wage gap. We are not equal, so, so people cannot afford fathers to take time off work because you don't get paid full salary. You, you get paid a certain percentage.

That's when we realized that, that people really don't know where the whole thing of parental leave comes from. They just think it's just a given that you have it and you can just decide whatever you want, you know?

Bridget: Yeah, that's what I thought was so interesting about that example is that it's, you know, to impose equality. And then people are saying, well, what about our choices then and our ability to make decisions? But those decisions invariably reinforce the inequalities.

Tatjana: Yeah, but I should also mention that it has been researched a lot and Silja Bowra maybe can speak to that because the academics here at the university research the parental leave a lot from all sides and aspects and it has only done good to families and to fathers and to marriages and children. So I think that we, we in general have very positive experience of both parents taking that leave.

I work with a lot of young people. I think that all the young men would just love to stay at home. Because there is no stigma about it. There is no, you know, you're not being man enough if, if, if you're taking care of your kid. That doesn't happen here. I don't think so.

Silja: Even more the opposite, I think.

Tatjana: Yeah. Yeah.

Bridget: So Silja, you also work with young people at the university everyday. What changes are you seeing over time in how younger people in Iceland are articulating a gender equality agenda or concerns?

Silja: I think what Tatjana is saying about people sort of thinking that the rights that they have are guaranteed and came out of nowhere almost. That there's not a lot of necessarily connection with the fights that had to be fought to create these rights.

But what I see them doing more is expanding these rights. They think about racial discrimination. They think about gender identities beyond the binary. They relate their interest to the environmental fight, resisting climate change, et cetera. So their, their worldview is far more broad, intersectional than my generations. I mean, I remember the 1983 elections where the number of women in parliament went from three to nine in one night. I grew up seeing very few women on TV or in the newspapers as role models for political participation. So, overall I see positive movements, but then we also see, like Tatjana was saying, you know, the financial realities, what remains is fixing the gender pay gap. In relationships, heterosexual relationships where you have a male and a female, usually the male will have higher salaries.

Bridget: So as I look around the US, there's this rising tide of conservatism that seeks to reduce gender equality by restricting how we even talk about it, how we teach about it, you know, limiting access to reproductive rights and more, and often in the name of protecting women. So these efforts will be and are being fought against. Do you think there are lessons that we can learn from the Icelandic movement about how you build and sustain and expand a movement over time? Silja, I'll start with you on this one?

Silja: It's difficult to, 'cause the context is so different. I think we've, in Iceland, benefited from being, at the beginning very homogenous, that it was easy to reach, you know, people who, even if they had politically opposed viewpoints, they shared so many other characteristics. And in the US there are so many bridges to cross to reach people.

Tatjana: You speak to an Icelander for two minutes, you will find common cousin, friend, or, or, or workplace.

Silja: Yeah. You've gone to the same school, you've had the same teachers, you've worked in the same summer jobs or, you know, something like that. So they don't come from these radically different places. Like you have somebody coming from Alabama or from, you know, LA, where you just have really, really different environments.

So, it'll be harder to be inclusive as society becomes more diverse because it's more difficult to reach people who...