On a Friday in October 1975, everything in Iceland came to a standstill. Daily newspapers could not be printed, schools and kindergartens remained closed. Flights had to be canceled – the typesetters, saleswomen, teachers, educators and stewardesses were missing. 90 percent of Icelandic women went on strike to draw attention to unfair pay and unfair distribution of wage and care work between the sexes.
The day now known as “Long Friday” is the model for today’s action by the intersectional feminist movement Daughters’ Collective, which is calling for a women’s strike (proper spelling women*strike) in Germany. (According to the organizers, the inserted asterisk is intended to indicate that “women” is a social and not a natural category.)
The name of the daughter collective comes from a quote from Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz. He had defended his suggestion about the “problematic cityscape” with the request “Ask your daughters”.
Perception is often still distorted
There are probably not as many women joining the movement as in Iceland back then, but the strike seems to be organized too decentrally. In addition, work is not stopped, but people meet to protest during their lunch break or after work. Maybe also because many people in Germany are of the opinion that enough has already been done for equal rights for women. According to a current survey by the consultancy Ipsos on the occasion of yesterday’s International Women’s Day, 46 percent of the approximately 1,000 respondents aged 16 to 74 in Germany are of this opinion. 37 percent of the men surveyed even stated that men are being discriminated against today because of the promotion of women.
And this despite the fact that the unadjusted gender pay gap in Germany, i.e. the difference in average hourly wages between men and women, is still 16 percent. But what if all women in Germany also stopped working today?
Without women, a lot would be missing
On the boards of large corporations, only one in four chairs would remain empty. In the IT departments, the failure could probably be bridged: in 2024, according to Destatis, the proportion of women in IT was less than 20 percent. The same source shows: Operations in the factory halls would hardly be affected with around 85 percent of men, and in the offices the staff would be reduced by 65 percent of the workforce.
Theoretically. This calculation does not yet take fathers in the workforce into account, because it is not just paid work that would be on strike. And women still do an average of 43 percent more unpaid care work than men, so they usually stay at home when care is unavailable or when it comes to caring for relatives. In such a scenario, all daycare centers in Germany would almost certainly remain closed: in 2024, 92 percent of the teaching staff in daycare centers were women. 81 percent of those who have relatives to care for also use women’s work.
As in Iceland in 1975, a lot of things would also be at a standstill in Germany. Perhaps such a wake-up call is urgently needed for society, politics and companies.
Angela Heider-Willms is responsible for reporting on the topics of transformation, change management and leadership. She also deals with the topic of diversity.
