Unpaid work
Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign – of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture – and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives. We have to start recognising that the work women do is not an added extra, a bonus that we could do without: women’s work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It’s about time we started valuing it.
Globally, 75% of unpaid work is done by women,7 who spend between three and six hours per day on it compared to men’s average of thirty
minutes to two hours. This imbalance starts early (girls as young as five do significantly more household chores than their brothers) and increases as they get older.
Women's Day Off
By the end of the day, 24 October 1975 came to be known by Icelandic men
as ‘the long Friday’. Supermarkets sold out of sausages – ‘the favourite ready meal of the time’. Offices were suddenly flooded with children hopped up on the sweets they had been bribed with in an effort to make them behave. Schools, nurseries, fish factories all either shut down or ran at reduced capacity. And the women? Well, the women were having a Day Off.
1975 had been declared by the UN as a Women’s Year, and in Iceland women were determined to make it count. A committee was set up with representatives from Iceland’s five biggest women’s organisations. After some discussion they came up with the idea of a strike. On 24 October, no woman in Iceland would do a lick of work. No paid work, but also no cooking, no cleaning, no child care. Let the men of Iceland see how they coped without the invisible work women did every day to keep the country moving.
Ninety per cent of Icelandic women took part in the strike. Twenty-five thousand women gathered for a rally (the largest of more than twenty to take place throughout the country) in Reykjavík’s Downtown Square – a
staggering figure in a country of then only 220,000 people.2 A year later, in 1976, Iceland passed the Gender Equality Act, which outlawed sex
discrimination in workplaces and schools.