Brynhildur Heiðar- og Ómarsdóttir, the secretary general of the Icelandic Women’s Rights Assocation, gave a talk at the Asahi World Forum 2019 on October 16th in Tokyo, Japan.

Her presentation was entitled “Women’s Strikes and Feminist Bureaucracy; and Other Tales from the North”, and Brynhildur emphasized that democracy and a sustainable future would be unthinkable without women’s rights.

Azusa Mishima, a staff writer at the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, moderated a discussion on gender equality following the presentation, discussing which solutions which have been implemented in Iceland might be suitable for Japan. Japan still has a long way to go to guarantee gender equality. Japan ranks worst among the G7 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, placed at 110 out of 149 countries.