You May Also Like: Disrupting Peace

This week, we're bringing you a special feed drop from Disrupting Peace, a podcast from the World Peace Foundation, which explores why peace hasn’t worked, and how it still could. In each episode, Bridget Conley, research director at the World Peace Foundation, speaks with a researcher specializing in one obstacle to peace, and an activist who’s changing systems from the ground up. Together they explore what worked, what didn’t, and why we shouldn’t give up.

This episode focuses on Iceland, the country ranked number one for gender equality for 15 years in a row. The episodes explores 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.

Access the Disrupting Peace podcast here: https://pod.link/1759500826

For more information, check out: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/2058-two-blocks-from-the-white-house

Transcript

Jennie 0:00

Hi Reapers, it's your host, Jenny Wetter, and I am here with a special bonus episode from our friends at the Disrupting Peace podcast. Disrupting Peace is produced by the World Peace Foundation and is hosted by the organization's research director, Bridget Conley. It explores why peace hasn't worked and how it still could. In each episode, Bridget speaks with a researcher specializing in one obstacle to peace and an activist who is changing systems from the ground up. Together they discuss what has worked, what didn't, and why we shouldn't give up. To give you a little taste of the show, I picked up an episode that I think is gonna resonate with the concerns of our community. This episode asks what we can learn about building and sustaining a women's movement from arguably the world's leaders, Icelandic feminists. For context, Iceland has been ranked number one for gender equality for 15 years in a row. This episode explores what makes Iceland unique, how younger generations are pushing the feminist agenda forward, and why limiting freedom around parental leave has increased equality. Bridget's guests are Celia Barra Olmustatar, a professor of international affairs at the University of Iceland, and Tatiana Latinovich, president of the Icelandic Women's Rights Association. On behalf of Disrupting Peace and Repros Fight Back, thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_03 1:27

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 U.S. is backsliding when it comes to democracy and human rights. And it is 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 Cilia Boro Olmusddater and Tatjana Latinovich. Cilia Boro Olmusdater 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 Latinovich has lived in Iceland since 1994 when she relocated there from Croatia. She's a vice president of intellectual property at Oster, 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. Thank you. Thank you. So I want to 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. Celia, I wonder, can you name one of the three non-European countries that also ranks in the top ten?

SPEAKER_04 4:18

Rwanda? No?

SPEAKER_03 4:19

I was going to mention Rwanda.

SPEAKER_04 4:21

They they don't do really well in uh politics at least. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:24

The three non-European top ten are New Zealand, Nicaragua, which I didn't know much about at all, and Namibia in Africa.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Namibia, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:37

Okay. Tatiana, 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 20s, the 30s, the 40s, or the 50s? I'd say 50s. Yeah, just underneath. We're apparently at 43. 43. Yeah. And my guess is we may hit in the 50s in the near future. Yeah. 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. Um, 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 Tatiana, I want to start with you. What are some of the reasons why Iceland ranks so high?

SPEAKER_01 5:43

I think we rank so high because of political participation and the reason that we had the woman president for 16 years. Vig Dispin Belt 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, uh we haven't reached complete equality. We're just not as bad as the rest of the world. But uh but the things that are not measured and do not fit in those metrics.

SPEAKER_03 6:19

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

SPEAKER_04 6:35

The Global Gender Gap report addresses 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 lagging metrics that that we've seen where Iceland is not as good as the neighboring countries, for example.

SPEAKER_03 6:53

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? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 7:06

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 uh, I mean, we're a Nordic welfare society. We've had fairly strong economic equity. We like to consider ourselves a classless society. I mean, we're seeing some leavages in that, I think, by now. And the worst thing is that that goes a lot on um immigrant and uh native-born differences.

SPEAKER_03 8:03

Aaron Powell So can you say a few more words about what is a Nordic welfare society?

SPEAKER_04 8:08

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 uh universal for children under primary school age, uh, although it is paid for out of pocket for parents.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

It is it is subsidized by uh municipalities.

SPEAKER_04 8:33

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. A month? Per month, yeah. 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 uh in 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.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Aaron Ross Powell We have a sort of social uh safety net. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:06

Exactly, exactly. The social safety net. And uh there's some interesting research on creativity. Uh 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 it that takes out the big pressures that most of us face.

SPEAKER_03 9:39

So can I just follow how much is tuition at the university?

SPEAKER_04 9:42

Uh we don't have tuition. We have a registration fee. We do have a couple of uh private universities in Iceland, but the uh 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.

SPEAKER_03 9:57

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?

SPEAKER_04 10:07

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 they've become a less stable worker, which means that employers need to consider all people at a more uh equal level. Aaron Ross Powell So how has the policy evolved over the years? Aaron Powell When the law was passed in 2000, there's 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 that 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. Yeah. 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 I think maybe another set of twins like he had four children in three years, uh, 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, it was still so high that then the law was amended. And so now there's a cap of about six thousand dollars approximately per month. So you your salary, your income actually drops. Aaron Powell And how long is paid parental leave in Iceland? Aaron Ross Powell 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.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It's always the mother. So a few years ago there was a legislation that said that we will extend the parental leave will be twelve months. And my organization and some other feminist and labor union organizations were advocating that it should be equally split. So six months uh 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 uh 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 that don't pay because they will not be discriminated against.

SPEAKER_03 13:31

So is it six months use it or lose it for each parent plus an additional six weeks?

SPEAKER_01 13:37

No, no, no, it's no no, it's not. Uh six weeks is included in this one year.

SPEAKER_03 13:41

Okay. So it's four and a half months, use it or lose it for each parent, and they get to choose who takes the remaining six weeks. Yeah. Has there been any resistance to the policy?

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Yeah, that's that's maybe an example of things that people take for granted, uh, young people, because you know, there was a pushback by even young people that are in a situation now that they 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 uh mothers that would be taken more in heterosexual relationships 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 to take time off work because you don't get paid full salary, you you get paid a certain percentage. That's when we realize 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.

SPEAKER_03 14:56

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.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Yeah. But I should also mention that it isn't researched a lot, and Celia Boricki 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 uh marriages and and children. So I think that we uh we in general have a very positive experience of both parents taking that leave. I 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.

SPEAKER_03 15:51

Even more the opposite, I think. Yeah, yeah. So Cecilia, you also work with young people at the university every day. What changes are you seeing over time in and how younger people in Iceland are articulating a gender equality agenda or concerns?

SPEAKER_04 16:08

I think uh what Tatiana is saying about people sort of thinking that the rights that they have are guaranteed and came out of nowhere almost, that's uh 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 interests to the environmental fight, resisting climate change, etc. So their their worldview is far more broad, uh intersectional than my generation's. I mean, I remember the 1983 elections where where the number of women in parliament went from three to nine in one night. I grew up seeing very few women on on TV or in the newspapers as role models for political participation. So overall I see positive movements. But then we also see, like Tatiana 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 uh higher salaries.

SPEAKER_03 17:22

Aaron Ross Powell 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? Celia, I'll start with you on this one.

SPEAKER_04 17:58

I think it's it's difficult to uh the because the context is uh so different. I think we've in Iceland benefited from being at the beginning very homogeneous 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's so many bridges to cross to reach people. So you you you speak to an Icelander for two minutes, you will find common cousin, friend, or or or workplace. Yeah. You've gone to the same school, you've had the same teachers, you worked in the same summer jobs or you know, something like that. You know, 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 will be harder to be inclusive as society becomes more diverse because it's more difficult to reach people who have a different language, who don't have access to the same social capital.

SPEAKER_03 18:59

Aaron Ross Powell Are there do you think there are no lessons then? I mean, how what about the engaging and maintaining a movement? How how does that happen over time? How do you continue to feed and nurture and expand that movement?

SPEAKER_04 19:15

Aaron Powell Well I think that's what's what's been uh successful here is this sort of constant renovation or rejuvenation of the movements. The uh Women's Rights Association here is almost 120 years old. We've always had this like, okay, there's something going on, you know, I want to see something different and people organize around it. And again, that might be because it's easy to reach out and the smallness makes it accessible. But it's also like the fights have been in many ways close to home that, you know, there's an issue. So I think that's something that you can relate to or try to transfer is what are the problems in your immediate neighborhood and your immediate environment that need to be addressed, you know, because that can be daycare, that can be elder care, you know, lifting the burden of care work that falls on on women far more than it does on men.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

And I I sort of I I welcome, you know, all these you know new revolutions being made like free the nipple girls, you know, and and and you know, sorry. You're gonna have to say Tatiana, what was that? Sorry. I don't know if you should say free the nipple. Ten years ago, can you believe it? I thought it was like last year, but it was ten years ago that girls from various colleges here just freed their nipples, you know, took off their brass and marched to protest sexist behavior of boys in schools. Slot shaming. Slut shaming and everything. That was great, you know, and and so we as older generations, you know, and and as organizations that that I'm heading, we need to sort of embrace and celebrate that there's plenty of room in feminism for various voices. Just like men do not agree on everything, women do not have to agree on everything, you know. So so I think that it's just very healthy to have these discussions. I speak a lot with activists in US and students, they come to visit, you know, so there's a lot there's a lot going on, but obviously it's more difficult and more complicated to mobilize and to do stuff on a larger scale than than it is in Iceland, you know, 300 and what, 90,000 people, you know.

SPEAKER_03 21:22

Yeah, and I would not argue that the women's movement or the gender equality movement in the US is not doing this, but I think to me it's resonates to hear about a movement that comes and is tied to people um concerned with their immediate, you know, very, very local context and trying to improve their lives.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

But then then it won't you won't reach equality only counting on on grassroots movements to fight for it. This needs to be inter institutionalized and this needs to go to legislation. That is, I think, the secret of sex in at least in Iceland.

SPEAKER_04 21:58

And I think that's maybe you know, where the the lesson can come, you know, it's like, you know, running for office, taking the steps that are needed to change your local legislatures, your local town council, et cetera. Because that's what the the women's list and the women's party here did in 1982 and 1983, was just put women up for office and supporting women for office. When the women's party was disbanded in in the late 90s and didn't run in 1999, all the other political parties realized that they had to put women uh somewhere in the leadership because otherwise they wouldn't get the women's votes or the one party would do it and they would get the women's women's votes. So you know organize locally try to affect your local decision-making bodies. And become a part of decision making.

SPEAKER_03 22:49

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So I'd like to ask both of you about the impact of younger generations on how you view gender equality. Do you have any examples of in interaction with a younger person that changed your views about gender equality?

SPEAKER_01 23:05

There was a group on Facebook I think that was called Beauty Tips and their girls mostly girls were exchanging information about, oh, here you can find an ice mascaron, this is how you put your tan on or whatever. And then for some reason it was like a safe space I guess many thousand Icelandic women were writing that they started sharing stories of sexual violence and domestic violence and and we call it the beauty tapes revolution that came out of it. It was very very interesting and this was uh this was a few years before we had this huge me too movement in Iceland. So so these were younger women that gathered there to discuss their beauty routines and somehow this the the question of inequality and and of violence all of a sudden found its place there and they participated in it. And I found it amazing. The young women and young people today I think that you know I admire their their courage and I I hear things that I haven't heard before. And we just need to be very careful not to lose them and very careful to give them platform and give them space to to express themselves.

SPEAKER_03 24:22

I love that example.

SPEAKER_04 24:24

Yeah and I think it's also goes to show what Tatiana was saying is that you never know where the safe spaces are, you know, to have uh an impact. For for me, I think there's a couple of my students who are are non-binary, just helping me realize that things like toilets matter. You know, we need to think about facilities, we need to think about access to basic needs, et cetera and you know being able to be the person that goes in and in meetings like at the University Council and saying like, no, okay, it's not okay if we're uh delaying on on this because you know like funds are tight or whatever because people need to be able to go to the bathroom in a place where they don't get discriminated against or or ostracized. I think it's just that these people are willing to share their fights, the resistance that they meet in their daily lives that people like me are able to support them.

SPEAKER_03 25:15

Yeah Celia let me ask so Celia as a university professor um a feminist university professor can you talk about how you teach and what you teach to try to nurture this younger generation and and help them see the world differently the change that I've experienced over the almost 20 years that I've been teaching now is when I taught feminist theories 20 years ago I met with resistance that students felt it was an irrelevant issue.

SPEAKER_04 25:43

There was always the the couple of women students who were like oh that's interesting but the the bigger group would be like why do I need to know this this is this is a non-issue. By now they all participate they think it's obvious that this is a a relevant concern. But now when I'm bringing like queer theory into the classroom that's where they light up and you know when we're showing them like that's where the resistance is now and bringing in the critical race theory and that's where they're being challenged and they ask the the more interesting questions.

SPEAKER_03 26:17

Yeah. So we always have a final question for our interviews um that we call collective dreaming. So this year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Islandic women's strike or the women's day off when women across the country refuse to work, including in the House or domestic work, to protest against wage discrepancies and unfair labor practices. But if we project another 50 years into the future imagine Iceland has not only made further strides in achieving gender equality but it's also become a leader in an international movement to advance gender equality and peace. What do we need to do in our lifetimes to get to that point? Tatiana can I start with you?

SPEAKER_01 27:08

Yeah I think first of all I think we should look at the whole world as our playground I don't think we should focus only on Iceland and how things are done here and being perfect and being the best version of ourselves because everything everything is interconnected. Famous women's strike in 75 I'm very often asked how did it happen? How did women like show did they just show up? No they didn't show up it was there was a whole year of preparations of conferences of meetings of gatherings why did women start doing that it's because the UN proclaimed that year a year as a year of a woman and the whole decade so you know as much as we'd like to say that we thought of this all no you know it it it came from somewhere else so that that's and and I do hope that we will I'm sure we will have other challenges but but I do hope that uh the gender equality and all the equality issues and and I know I'm speaking now in in the wake of of many changes in in in in your country I do hope we will reach an agreement that equality is is for good and that advances societies not that it's something that is unnecessary or even something that shouldn't be implemented in order to protect women.

SPEAKER_03 28:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 28:33

Celia what do you think we should do in our lifetimes Yeah I think the most important thing is like what Tatiana said is to recognize where ideas come from that they don't come from a vacuum uh or appear in a vacuum that there is an interconnected uh world where I mean for the abortion example the work that we're seeing in in Latin America is amazing and the transformation that we're seeing there just is so important. And I think we in the West or maybe in the Nordic countries, we have sort of an exceptionalist approach that you know things here are so good that we should be a model, whatever. We need to look to the margins, look at the people whose voices are marginalized and lift those and amplify those because that's where progress will come from and we need to be prepared. You know the event in 1975 I was living in a small town in the north and I was four so um I don't have a memory of it but reading about it it seems like it came as a surprise to the system, to men, to patriarchy. But that's because it was prepared in silence in you know in in the homes and so prepare, resist oppression, lift the marginalized voices and and that's where that's where there's opportunity for progress because people like in my position with high education native born able-bodied all this my rights are are not the main concern right now it's how to get people who don't enjoy the rights that we've already secured move them towards ours our rights.

SPEAKER_03 30:06

Yeah keep expanding the circle absolutely all right thank you so much both of you for joining me um in this conversation thank you thank you good luck if it wanted to the Icelandic gender equality movement could look at its global rankings and rest on its laurels. But what Cilia and Tatiana described is a dynamic and evolving movement. It's probing new issues like sexual and gender-based violence and it's being challenged by younger generations. The debates keep it relevant and while there are certainly traits that make Iceland unique Tatiana and Cilia offered advice we can all use ground efforts at the very local level address problems that people face in their everyday lives and demand a seat at the table where decisions are made. As a final note I want to draw attention to their point that as it turns out fathers love their children and want to spend time with them. Increasing gender equality improves everyone's quality of life I'm Bridget Conley. You can find out more about Tatiana's work through the Icelandic Women's Rights Association website. Learn more about Celia's research and teaching through the website of the University of Iceland unfortunately I can't pronounce the URLs and they'd be tough to remember but you can find them on our show notes.

SPEAKER_02 31:50

Next week on Disrupting peace we're looking at how South Korea successfully overturned the president's attempt to declare martial law the first class of the proclamation of martial law was restricting the National Assembly's activities. So that by itself is very unconstitutional and South Korea was not going through a severe crisis so it was it was not justifiable.

SPEAKER_03 32:23

Disrupting peace is a production of the World Peace Foundation find out more at worldpeacefoundation.org and we've moved from X to Blue Sky where you can find us at worldpeacefdtn.bsky dot social You can also find us on Instagram at worldpeacefdn the show is produced by myself and Emily Shaw engineering by Jacob Winnick and Asia Simpson marketing and social media by Emily Room show artwork by Simon Fung. Special thanks to Jeremy Helton my colleagues Lisa Avery, B. Arneson and Alex Duvall and the team from the Tufts Digital Design Studio including Kemberly Lynn Ferrero Arnias and Miles Donovan. Okay until next time stay skeptical and hopefully