Lady Business: Iceland’s gender utopia, 30 female prime ministers, and three murderous queens

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the forty-first issue, published September 6, 2018.
 

Political Paradise

 
Last weekend, I ditched my laptop for five glorious days and escaped to the most Instagrammable place on earth. Iceland is, as advertised, insanely photogenic; insanely expensive; and insanely popular with tourists, who now outnumber residents 7 to 1. (Pro tip: Do rent a car to get away from them all--but expect that everyone else will have the same idea, at the same time.)
 
It was a glorious, beautiful, glacier-filled vacation--and that doesn’t even take into account the most on-brand reason Lady Business recommends you go to Iceland: It’s also the most gender-equal country in the world, a title it’s won from the World Economic Forum for the last nine years.
 
Government-regulated pay parity. Mandatory three-month maternity and paternity leave. And a competent, trusted, progressive, feminist, environmentalist, female prime minister -- one who’s not even the first woman to lead the country.
 
Katrin Jakobsdottir, a 42-year-old seasoned politician, environmental activist, literary scholar and mother of three, was elected Iceland’s prime minister last November, after years of political turmoil. She follows Johanna Sigurdardottir, who became the country’s first female prime minister (and the world's first openly lesbian leader) in 2009; and Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who in 1980 was the first woman in the world to become a country's directly elected president (a more ceremonial role in Iceland).
 
But, as Jakobsdottir pointed out in this long Nation profile from April, just because she’s the second leader of the most gender-egalitarian country in the world doesn’t mean that sexism is solved, great, thanks, we can all go home:
 

A relentless champion of her country, Jakobsdóttir can recount all the history and all the statistics. She admires her predecessors, especially Finnbogadóttir: “I was 4 years old when she was elected in 1980. When she left office in 1996, and then there was a man elected, I heard a kid asking, ‘Can a man become president?’ Think of the culture change in that!” For her part, Finnbogadóttir delights in the progress; when we met, she told me that “now it is becoming natural that women serve as prime ministers. It is natural that they become ministers. This is a step forward, for your daughter and for my granddaughter.”

This is true, Jakobsdóttir says, but it is important to understand that the cultural change is still in its early stages. “I could sense that when I said that I wanted to become prime minister. A lot of people said, ‘Whoa! Aren’t you being too pleased with yourself?’ Nobody would say that to a man.”

Always on the lookout for a teachable moment, the new leader of Iceland has a ready response for those who read too much into her rise to power. “When people say to me, ‘Now you’re prime minister, and isn’t that a sign that Iceland is just a paradise north for gender equality?,’ I say, ‘Well, we would need 30 women, at least, in a row to become prime minister if I were to say yes to that’—because we had 30 men before me. I’m just number two.”

 
There are a lot of “to be sures” you could attach to Jakobsdottir’s accomplishments. Eg: To be sure, she’s running a country of only 340,000 voters, which is smaller than the populations of 56 American cities. (Yet Honolulu, population 350,000, has had exactly one female mayor, in the 1980s. Santa Ana, population 334,000, has had the same dude in charge since 1994.)
 
And, to be sure, Jakobsdottir is governing a precarious coalition of strange parliamentary bedfellows; her feminist, environmentalist, leftist party formed a governing group with two center-right parties, while her opposition includes the hacker-anarchist Icelandic Pirate Party. It’s not an obvious setup for a long and harmonious tenure in her role. (Although before her election, Iceland had four prime ministers in two years, so her 10 months in office is already an accomplishment!)

And I was struck, reading that WEF report about how Iceland reached the top of the gender-equality charts, by how recent so much of its progress has been. It’s not like this is Wonder Woman’s island, matriarchal since inception; Icelandic women only got the right to vote a few years before American women won their suffrage, and “during the period from 1915 to 1983, only 2%-5% of members of Parliament were women.” Also: “In 2012, Iceland’s first female bishop was inaugurated. It had taken a century.”

So it’s hard not to envy Iceland, a little -- or to think of it as what the United States could be by now, if we just made slightly different choices (and put in a lot more effort). But there’s also a comfort to the fact that Iceland’s gender equality is of such relatively recent vintage, and that it came after sustained protest movements and a decades-long political effort to get more women into office. As The Guardian pointed out in December:
 

Auður Styrkársdóttir, former director of Iceland’s Women’s History Archive, can see some parallels between the Women’s March on Washington – which saw 500,000 people descend on the US capital and another 1.5 million join them in hundreds of cities across the world – and Iceland’s 1975 Women’s Day Off, which experts cite as a momentous event in the fight for women’s rights.
 
… If the tiny nation has anything to teach the States, it is this: don’t give up. “Just keep going,” says Styrkársdóttir. “Icelandic women aren’t here because it was handed to us – we had to fight all the way, and we are still fighting.”

Lady Bits:

--On the plane home, I read the first book in Kendare Blake’s Three Dark Crowns series, a feminist YA fantasy that’s particularly post-Hunger Games. (“What if, instead of being forced to kill random other kids, the heroines had to kill their sisters?”) It’s a fun, fast read that’s also more than a little Game of Thrones, but pleasantly unpreachy about its matriarchal society or the fact that all of the most interesting characters are women. And I don’t know if Blake intentionally modeled her windswept, isolated island nation off of Iceland, but it certainly felt thematic!
 
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