A Quote by Catherine Mayer
Iceland's Women's Day Off in 1975 saw 90% of Icelandic women take time off from their paid and unpaid work, an experience that not only showed women how much they contribute but turned Icelandic men into supporters of gender equality. I aim to achieve the same impact in the UK.
Related Quotes
Gender equality, historically has been predominantly a women's movement for women. But I think the impact of gender inequality and how it's affecting men hasn't really been addressed.
I'm the first Icelandic director who started working on U.S. movies. There are others behind me now, but it's like when Bjork opened the door for Icelandic musicians to work abroad. We're such a closed-off country, but Bjork broke the spell. And I'm glad it was a woman who did it. She showed us we could break this barrier.
U.N. Women was created due to the acknowledgement that gender equality and women's empowerment was still, despite progress, far from what it should be. Transforming political will and decisions, such as the Member States creating U.N. Women, into concrete steps towards gender equality and women's empowerment, I think is one of the main challenges.
Family-supportive policies, which enable women to remain and progress in paid employment and encourage men to take their fair share of care work, are crucial to achieving gender equality at work.
It was a great joy for me to develop a strong female character in the spirit of an Icelandic woman. Icelandic women tend to be very strong and very independent, and I think that came in very handy.
And this exclusion of "women's work" continues, despite United Nations data gathered since 1975 (the beginning of the UN Decade for Women) indicating that women globally contribute two-thirds of the world's work hours, for which - given the imbalanced, unjust, and truly peculiar nature of the accounting characteristic of dominator economics - they globally earn only one-tenth of what men do and own a mere one-hundredth of the world's property.
It's interesting that there's so many different sides of this: Women get frustrated that we don't get paid enough; and then the Republicans or the CEOs that are men say, "Well, it's because women take off time for maternity leave."
People ask me almost every day, "Why? You are successful, you have kids, you have grandchildren, so why?" Feminist women are seen as unsatisfied. But all women in the world, if they are well aware of inequality, are unsatisfied women. They don't have the same rights as men, and there is no freedom until there is equality between men and women.
Feminism is a belief that although women and men are inherently of equal worth, most societies privilege men as a group. As a result, social movements are necessary to achieve political equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies.
What we are saying is, we've got three aluminum factories, let's work with that, we cannot change that. Why not have the Icelandic people who are educated in high-tech and work already in those factories in the higher paid jobs, why not let them build little companies who are totally Icelandic with the knowledge they have? Then they get the money and it stays in the country. Then we can support the biotech companies and the food companies and all these clusters. I think that if you want to be an environmentalist in Iceland, these are the things you've got to be putting your energy into.
Gender equality is essential for ensuring that men and women can contribute fully at home, at work, and in public life for the betterment of societies and economies at large.
Unnur Birna is a Reykjavik-based violinist and singer. She has performed as a session musician with countless Icelandic and international artists while recording and appearing as a solo artist as well. Unnur has joined me as an unpaid guest on a few Icelandic shows in recent years, so it is a great pleasure to return the favour and appear on one of her songs at last. This new track, Sunshine, came about in Italy, written as an ode to sunlight and happiness after fleeing the dark winter in Iceland
That's the trouble with the women's game. Those women think they're men, and they go off hitting all over the place. They'd be better off if they'd played like women.
Women have to work much harder to make it in this world. It really pisses me off that women don't get the same opportunities as men do, or money for that matter. Because lets face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define our values and to define what's sexy and what's feminine and that's bullshit. At the end of the day, it's not about equal rights, it's about how we think. We have to reshape our own perception of how we view ourselves.
We need a national family leave policy that will allow both men and women to take paid time off from work to care for a newborn or a sick relative.
I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didn?t even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of women?of embryos, of eggs, of bodies?by a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasn?t freedom from men but total control by men.
Related Authors
Brian Tracy Quotes
American
Author
Cassandra Clare Quotes
American
Author
Frederick Lenz Quotes
American
Author
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
American
Author
J. K. Rowling Quotes
English
Author
Jodi Picoult Quotes
American
Author
John Green Quotes
American
Author
Joyce Meyer Quotes
American
Author
Marianne Williamson Quotes
American
Author
Neil Gaiman Quotes
British
Author
Richelle Mead Quotes
American
Author
Rick Riordan Quotes
American
Author
Robert Kiyosaki Quotes
American
Author
Stephen King Quotes
American
Author
Terry Pratchett Quotes
English
Author
Virginia Woolf Quotes
British
Author