evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

Kvennafrídagurinn — Iceland's Women's Strike for Equal Pay and Recognition of Unpaid Work

Iceland · Reykjavík · See the Iceland profile · See the Reykjavík profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 17% 89/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

On 24 October 1975, an estimated 90% of Icelandic women stopped paid and unpaid work for a day, shutting down schools, flights and factories to demand equal pay; the strike has recurred five times since and preceded Iceland's 1976 Equal Rights Act.

90% % of Icelandic women
Icelandic women participating in the 1975 strike (1975)
25,000
Estimated Reykjavík rally attendance (1975)
70,000-100,000
Participants in the 2023 strike (2023)
over 40%
Lifetime gender-based violence prevalence reported by 2023 organisers (2023)

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Icelandic Women's Rights Association (Kvenréttindafélag Íslands) and the Redstockings movement, with a national trade-union and civil-society coalition
Period
1975–present (recurring: 1975, 1985, 2005, 2016, 2018, 2023)
Keywords
civil society, labour rights, civic mobilisation, pay equity

Context

In 1975 the Icelandic Women's Rights Association and the Redstockings movement organised Kvennafrídagurinn, a nationwide one-day work stoppage protesting wage discrimination and the invisibility of unpaid domestic labour.

Objectives

The action aimed to make visible the economic value of women's paid and unpaid work and to press for equal-pay legislation.

Activities

An estimated 90% of Icelandic women refused paid and unpaid work for a day, shutting down schools, banks, factories and telephone exchanges; the strike has since been repeated five times, most recently in 2023.

Results

Iceland's parliament passed the Act on Equal Pay and Equal Status the following year, and the model has been cited as an inspiration for later mass strikes in Poland, Spain and Switzerland, while Iceland has topped the WEF Global Gender Gap Index since 2009.

Conclusions

Mobilisation shifted law and public norms, but organisers note that underlying inequalities such as gender-based violence remain far from resolved.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — No cost-effectiveness or resourcing data exist; it operates as a civic mobilisation without a dedicated institutional budget.
Time to results
Short (< 1 year)
Staffing & skills
volunteer organisers from women's rights organisations and trade unions

Conditions for success

  • a broad coalition of women's organisations and trade unions
  • civil-society mobilisation rather than institutional funding
  • recurrence sustained voluntarily by successive generations of organisers

Common failure modes

  • mobilisation alone did not eliminate underlying gender-based violence or the residual pay gap

Commonly funded by

Own resources / municipal budget

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Similar practices you may find useful