Fifty Years Later, Push For Equality Continues: Remembering The Strike That Stopped The Nation

On October 24, 1975, 90 percent of women all around Iceland went on strike. Twenty-five thousand of them gathered on Arnarhóll hill in Reykjavík to show how undervalued their contribution to society was, both in the labour market and at home, and to demand equal pay. The nation came to a standstill. Factories stopped, shops, kindergartens, and schools closed, flights were grounded, and television broadcasts were disrupted. At home, meals went uncooked, housework was left undone, and men — some for the first time — found themselves bringing children to work, scrambling to make hot dogs for dinner, and figuring out how to keep a household running.

The strike, officially named Kvennafrídagurinn, or the Women’s Day Off, laid the foundation for Iceland’s journey toward gender equality and was repeated in 1985, 2005, 2010, 2016, 2018, and 2023, with the last one drawing an estimated 100,000 participants.

One of the women who stood in the crowd at Arnarhóll in October 1975 was Lilja Ólafsdóttir, one of the founders of the Icelandic branch of the radical feminist group Red Stockings and, in the past, a manager with the City of Reykjavík, including the first woman ever to serve as CEO of Strætó.

“Before, women had just been doing their work and complaining about not being equal and not getting paid. But then suddenly, they had a voice.”

Fifty years later, Lilja sits in her living room and shows me a large folder with newspaper clippings and photos from that period. “We were young women in the workforce, and more or less unhappy about our situation. We had lower wages and fewer opportunities. There was no daycare for children of married women, and in every aspect, we didn’t feel we were equal,” she says.

Over the years, a few women’s rights organisations fought for equality in Iceland, with one major milestone coming in 1915, when women won the right to vote. By the 1970s, however, their efforts had become largely low-key, Lilja recalls.

“On the first day of May, Labour Day, they used to have demonstrations going down Laugavegur, the main street at that time, to demonstrate their demands for the workers. On that day, I heard on the radio, ‘Women in red stockings should gather at Hlemmur,’ where the demonstration would start. I went there with a friend of mine, and that was the start of it. Of course, the labour union didn’t want us there. They thought it was a degradation, I think, for them to have women there. There were women participating in their parade, but they didn’t want any women’s liberation activists to join, so they tried to convince the police to stop us from walking there. In the end, the police, of course, couldn’t prevent anyone from walking down Laugavegur,” Lilja remembers, trying to see if she has any photos from that day.

“That was the beginning. After that day, we got together — 40 or 50 women — and decided to form a movement. We worked on it that summer, and in the autumn, we founded Rauðsokkahreyfingin (the Red Stockings movement).”

Since its foundation in 1970, the movement worked to achieve demands such as accessible daycare, equal wages, and the “same rights for women.” “Not only same rights, but only also for the same position, same opportunities,” Lilja clarifies. “We were very firm, and we worked hard for the next five years, achieving many things during that time. The highlight of it was when we had the strike on the 24th of October 1975.”

Photo by Art Bicnick

The day women took to the streets

“I was born in 1943, so I seem to have been 33 when we had the strike,” says Lilja, who’s now 82. Though she would go on to spend most of her career in leadership positions, Lilja didn’t start at the top. “I started on the floor,” she says. “I remember I was hired as chief cashier, or treasurer, and then I discovered that the man who had this position before had got much higher wages. I went to look at the union, and the union had negotiated for higher wages for men in the same position than women. It sounded like this: for this position, a man should have this amount, a woman should have this amount. This was unbelievable.”

At the time of the strike, Lilja was already working as a manager for Rafmagnsveita Reykjavíkur, the city’s electrical utilities company, and she admits that news of the strike was neither treated negatively nor did it disrupt their work. “The ladies there felt free to do and say what they wanted, and it didn’t have any effect on their work at all,” she says.

This wasn’t the case in many other workplaces, where women weren’t allowed to participate — or were even threatened with being fired if they did. “In my case, I was a manager, so I stood there and I said, ‘I’m going and everybody should go.’”

The year 1975 had been declared by the United Nations as the International Women’s Year, and during a special Women’s Congress held in Reykjavík in June that year, a representative of Red Stockings proposed holding a nationwide strike. It was later agreed to call it a “day off” — many of the more conservative members feared that the word “strike” might discourage women from joining, and that employers would be more likely to grant a day off than tolerate a strike.

From June to October, Lilja and other organisers spent months preparing. They appeared on radio programmes, ran a weekly column in Morgunblaðið and talked to people around the country — ringing up everyone they knew from Egilsstaðir to Ísafjörður, spreading the word about the strike and urging women to participate. Yet despite this groundwork, Lilja admits: “We didn’t know what would happen and what to expect.”

“People were floating in, it was like a river coming, from every corner — from Bankastræti, from Kalkofnsvegur, from Lækjargata, from Austurstræti, and suddenly the square was filled.”

On the day of the strike, Lilja planned to leave her son with his father, “But he was so eager to participate, so he came with me down to the square and was with me the whole day,” she recalls.

Had her son refused to join her, it wouldn’t have been a problem — her late husband was fully supportive. “My husband from the beginning and all the time stood by my side, and he was as eager as I was to work on this,” she says. “He saw the light in having equality — he didn’t have to support his wife or his family alone. He wanted to have a partner and friend, not a housewife at home.”

Lilja shows me a cutting from the front page of Morgunblaðið and travels back to that day in her memories. “In the end, 90 percent of women in the country took [a day] off from work. I won’t forget standing there at the main square where a stage was put up, and we had speeches. We stood there in the middle of Lækjartorg on the stage, and we noticed people, they were floating in, it was like a river coming, from every corner — from Bankastræti, from Kalkofnsvegur, from Lækjargata, from Austurstræti, and suddenly the square was filled. It was really packed on all the side streets. It was like a victory, somehow.”

The mood, she recalls, was celebratory rather than defiant. Instead of anger, the women brought energy, solidarity, and a sense that something was shifting. “The atmosphere was positive,” Lilja says. “Now you see how powerful women are in Iceland. Now you see that this nation will never go without the full participation of women.”

Their presence — or rather, their absence — was felt across the country that day. Even the infrastructure came to a halt. Back then, telephone connections were made manually, and most of the people plugging the lines were women. They all left to join the strike, leaving Iceland practically cut off from the outside world. The event had also drawn international media attention, and many journalists struggled to send their reports abroad. Lilja smiles, “That was also very powerful.”

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index has rated Iceland the most gender-equal country for the last 16 years. The Women’s Day Off in 1975 did not instantly accomplish this, but the strike set in motion changes that grew stronger over time.

“There was never any single moment, at least,” says Lilja. “But that was the trend. Little by little, it became clear that many women had felt their strength during that day. Before, they had just been doing their work and complaining about not being equal and not getting paid. But then suddenly, they had a voice. They started to talk more freely and make more demands. We woke up the next day, and nothing had changed, of course. It’s not a revolution. Revolutions are usually not very good. Evolution is much better. Afterwards, I know that there was an evolution starting that day.”

Just five years after the strike, in 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was elected Iceland’s first female president — and the world’s first democratically elected female head of state. Lilja is confident that the strike was one of the stepping stones that made it possible.

“I think that probably she would not have been elected if the day off hadn’t happened,” says Lilja. When I ask if she really believes that, she adds, “I think so. This point of view — from women being somehow inferior to men, to equality — was developing in society. By the time she was elected, people were starting to think, ‘yes, why not?’”

Platforming the story

The legacy of the 1975 strike, along with the stories of Lilja and countless other women, became the foundation of the 2024 documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still, directed by Emmy-winning filmmaker, journalist, and media executive Pamela Hogan, in collaboration with Icelandic producer Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir.

Pamela, who now works as an independent filmmaker and teaches documentary at Columbia Journalism School, has decades of experience in journalism and TV, with many of her projects, including work during her time as head of co-productions at National Geographic Television, devoted to women’s stories. “I never went into it with the mission of, ‘I’m going to tell stories about women.’ I was just interested in people and amazing things that people have done,” she says, speaking to me over video from New York in the early morning. “Over the years, especially as I became a commissioning editor — a gatekeeper, somebody people all over the world are sending their stories to, and I’m trying to decide which are the best ones for my series — that’s when I started noticing a pattern, which is that nobody was telling women’s stories.”

Pamela began focusing on projects that highlighted women, from Bosnian women during the war to Rwandan women leading the country forward after the genocide.

Then, by chance, she came across the story of Iceland’s 1975 women’s strike in a travel guide while on holiday with her family. The story stuck with her. “I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. It was just chasing me around,” she says. “I was sure somebody had made a film about it, but nobody had, and when I started researching it and finding out how amazing these women were, I just couldn’t stop until we made the film. I can’t explain it. It was like an obsession.”

Over the course of about seven years, Pamela returned to Iceland multiple times to work on the film. Later on, she brought Hrafnhildur on board, and the project really took off.

The film, which focuses on archival footage from the day, 15 minutes of black-and-white footage from RÚV and an additional 10 minutes in colour from a private archive, paired with interviews and animation, relives the period of preparation to the strike and the events of October 24. Pamela tells me they spoke to 52 people on camera, and many more off camera. The footage that wasn’t used in the film will be donated to the Women’s History Archives (Kvennasögusafn) in Reykjavík.

Reflecting on the approach to telling the story through extensive interviews, Pamela explains, “One of the women in the film says that, ‘we felt that a hierarchy was something that men do. We were all equal, no leaders.’ So how could I make the film about one or two of the women that I thought were the most charismatic?” she rhetorically asks. “It had to be a collective. We even tried, in the editing, to have them finish each other’s sentences because it just seemed like that was the spirit of the movement.”

Through personal memories of the women — and a few men who joined the movement — the film shows the resistance that this generation faced, what it took to be a feminist in 1970s Iceland, and how they used humour as a tool. “They really had the long view in mind,” says Pamela. “They wanted to change. They didn’t want to fight.”

The Day Iceland Stood Still premiered at the prestigious Hot Docs documentary festival in Canada. Since then, it has travelled to festivals around the world and opened in cinemas abroad — 100 screens in Germany and Austria alone during Women’s History Month in March. Even months later, the film is still showing in 45 theatres across the region.

“It’s been a gift,” Pamela says of the success of the film. “Among other things, the Icelandic Embassy has taken the film and is using it in their diplomacy this year. In countries like Malawi, it’s being shown all over the country thanks to the embassy. They also brought it to Beijing. A story like this is not something that the Beijing censors want the public to see, but the embassy showed it to influencers, and there’s now a movement to get the story seen more widely in China. We’ll see whether that happens. It’s about to open on October 24 in theatres all over Japan. When we were in South Korea at a film festival, our audience was all women in their 20s. They are so determined to change the patriarchy and feel so downtrodden by it, they were literally taking notes.”

If the 2023 Women’s Day Off hadn’t happened, The Day Iceland Stood Still would have a different ending. Just as Pamela and Hrafnhildur were wrapping the film, the strike took place, its scale surpassing all previous ones: with 100,000 attendees, one in four Icelanders was at Arnarhóll that day.

“We do include that footage,” Pamela shares. “And I think it’s great for the film, because, of course, the idea we want to leave with people is the fight goes on in Iceland. Women are not sitting back and saying, ‘Oh, great.’ What I loved about that strike was that my understanding of the thinking behind it was: because we’re considered a world leader in women’s equality, we have the responsibility to show that we’re not there yet. Nobody’s there yet.”

Beneath the surface, work to be done

From the outside looking in, Iceland appears to have cracked the code. Last year, we elected our second woman president. For the third time, a woman is serving as a prime minister, and today both the national cabinet and Reykjavík’s city government are led by women, as are the national church, the national police, the office of the state prosecutor, and all public and private universities.

Compared to the rest of the world, we seem to have reached a point where another woman in leadership rarely raises an eyebrow.

“Because we’re considered a world leader in women’s equality, we have the responsibility to show that we’re not there yet. Nobody’s there yet.”

Yet scratch beneath this progressive surface, we often echo the same old biases we so proudly claim to have overcome. When Ragnhildur Þrastardóttir was recently hired as editor of investigative news programme Kveikur, selected as the best candidate among ten others, the journalists asked whether she was surprised to be chosen for this role. This is a question that quietly implies her appointment was surprising, perhaps unearned, and somehow up for debate; one that would never be asked of a man. In July, Vísir reported on a case in which a woman working multiple jobs was denied a mortgage and subjected to sexist comments from an Íslandsbanki employee. Rather than highlighting the bank’s discrimination in the headline, the media used it as a hook in the lede: “It’s simply more expensive to be a woman.”

These examples are not isolated, and they are especially hard to digest looking at the international ratings where Iceland keeps doing exceptionally well. Coming back to the 2025 World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, Iceland is the only country that scored over 90 percent in gender gap closure, with 92.6 percent. No other country has ever scored above 90 percent.

But according to Dagný Aradóttir Pind, legal advisor at BSRB, the largest federation of public sector unions in Iceland, “Gender equality has not been reached in most areas.”

Photo by Art Bicnick

The pay gap remains a persistent issue: rather than shrinking, Iceland is seeing a negative trend. “The gender pay gap right now is 10.4 percent — for the year 2024. It was going down slowly, but now it has increased in the last two years, from 8.6 percent in 2022 to 10.4 percent in 2024,” says Dagný. In some sectors, such as in financial and insurance activities it’s considerably higher, reaching 26.1 percent. In addition to the pay gap, in 2023, the difference in average wages for men and women was at 21.9 percent. “This affects women long term, through their working lives and into their pension age. Statistics Iceland has confirmed many times that the biggest factor when it comes to the gender pay gap is the under evaluation of women-dominated sectors.”

BSRB is pushing for a reevaluation and comparison between jobs of equal value, not just the same jobs in traditionally women-centric sectors, such as social work, healthcare, and education. Such a change and a system for additional pay, since men usually receive higher extra payments, should be introduced and “hopefully that will lead to a more equal labour market.”

The inequality extends far beyond the traditional office. According to the 2023 survey by Gallup, two-thirds of women in heterosexual relationships claim more responsibility for doing domestic chores than their partner. They are the ones who are more likely to clean, wash and do laundry, oversee grocery shopping and other types of shopping, such as purchasing gifts or clothing. The load of the “third shift” — unseen cognitive and emotional toil that includes managing the household and relationships, taking care of children or elderly family members, and remembering appointments, school activities, and birthdays — is carried by 76 percent of female respondents.

Gender-based violence remains one of the biggest issues Iceland is yet to tackle. “About 40 percent of women are victims of gender-based violence in their lifetime. The numbers for gender-based harassment in the workplace are also very high. This reality is a constant threat to women’s safety and affects all areas of their life,” says Dagný.

As the manosphere spreads into workplaces and schoolyards, nearly a third of Icelandic boys aged 16-19 say they dislike feminists and trans people, a 2023 survey by the Icelandic Media Commission shows.

“We are also seeing an increase in sexism and hatred against LGBTQI+ people and violence among young people, so we really have to act on this,” Dagný adds. “This is an area where we have really not made any progress.”

Many of the issues where Iceland could improve in gender equality are deeply connected to broader underlying problems. Fifty years ago, Lilja was striking for access to daycare. Today, according to Dagný, “many women have to leave the labour market to take care of children that don’t get a place in [daycare] when parental leave ends.” Yes, Iceland is highly fortunate to have parental leave available for both parents, but Dagný emphasises that children should have a legal right to a daycare spot at 12 months, when parental leave ends.

This is just a fraction of where Iceland could do better, and Lilja, Pamela, and Dagný agree: there’s plenty of work ahead.

Fifty years after she walked to Arnarhóll instead of heading to work, Lilja says, “Equality is probably more here than in most other countries. It’s easier to be a woman here,” she pauses, “But it’s not 100 percent.”

The Day Iceland Stood Still will be shown on RÚV on October 19 and afterwards will be available online. It’s also screening at Bíó Paradís on October 24 and is available on VOD through krummafilms.com