THE women of Iceland abandoned their desks, classrooms and kitchen stoves yesterday to join a remarkable protest strike for equal wages.

Marching through Reykjavik and other Icelandic towns, they banged pots and pans and shouted, “Women, let’s be loud!” and “Equality now!”

The 50,000 protesters included actresses, politicians, fish factory workers, teachers and diplomatic staff. Alp Mehmet, the British Ambassador to Iceland, said of his female employees: “If I’m asked, I’ll let them go.”

All the main embassies ground to a halt, as did the banks, government departments, most shops and kindergartens. Many fathers brought their children to work.The protest was timed to start at 2.08pm. Activists calculated that this amounted to 64.1 per cent of the working day. Icelandic women complain that the average female wage is 64.1 per cent of the male income, even though a large majority of women are holding down jobs as well as taking the largest share of childcare.

Thirty years ago Icelandic women began a strike that became a milestone for the international feminist movement. Advisers from Iceland helped to steer protests across Europe, but no strike had quite the force of the original: 25,000 women protested in 1975 out of a population of 220,000.

That protest sent shockwaves through the whole of the Nordic community and paved the way for the election five years later of Vigdis Finnbogadottir, the first democratically elected female President.

“I was a theatre director in 1975,” she recalled. “Actresses and ticket clerks asked me for the time off to protest. I told them I would be there, too.”

Mrs Finnbogadottir is no longer President but she is still a figure of authority. She supported the walkout yesterday.

So, too, did Steinunn Valdis Oskarsdottir, the Mayor of Reykjavik. “I would ask that employers in Iceland respect the wishes of women who want to leave at this time,” she said.

Population experts have always argued that modern, prosperous societies tend to have fewer children. But Iceland, one of the wealthiest societies in Europe, bucks the trend. “Almost 90 per cent of women are employed,” Reiner Klingholz, the head of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, said. “Yet on average they have two children, far more than in Germany.”

Iceland, in short, seems to be the envy of ageing societies such as Germany. “There is a remarkable balance between profession and childcare,” Krista Mahr, the Editor of the influential Icelandic Review, said.

Yet the price is becoming unacceptably high for many Icelandic women: the financial and physical strain has become too much. “Responsibility for housework and childcare is still overwhelmingly on the shoulders of a woman,” a spokesperson for the Woman’s Day Off movement said.

Women, she said, should be paid equal wages and be encouraged to rise in all areas of society. “A woman has never been Prime Minister, bank manager or bishop in this country,” she said. “Women have never occupied half the seats in parliament.”

The measuring stick for Icelandic feminists is increasingly Norway and Sweden. Norway is pushing for female quotas on the boards of companies. Sweden, meanwhile, has a feminist party that has been demanding a “man tax” to cover the cost of violence against women in the home and calling for the abolition of marriage and the creation of more “gender neutral” names such as Robin. At present Swedish parents have to choose names from an official list.

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb