Source: The Telegraph
This week, Iceland will host a gender equality conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York in the spirit of Emma Watson's HeForShe campaign. Foreign minister Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson tells Lauren Davidson why part of the event will be just for men.

When Iceland's Progressive Party, part of the ruling coalition, introduced a gender quota to its pre-election lists of candidates in 2005, no one expected that the first time it would have to invoke the rule, four years later, would be to elevate a male candidate into an all-female top 10.
That unexpected expression of equality, used to promote a man rather than a woman, foreshadowed Iceland's current mission to open up a female-led debate to men.
On Wednesday, Iceland will host a conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York City to discuss issues of gender equality such as violence against women, parental rights and female representation in business.
But the conference is different to others of its kind, because women have not been invited.
In the spirit of the "He For She" campaign launched last year by actress Emma Watson with a speech that urged "as many men and boys as possible to be advocates for gender equality", the UN is calling upon world leaders and business executives, who are overwhelmingly male, to tackle the lack of women in senior political and financial positions around the world.
The event has been dubbed the Barbershop Conference to evoke the type of conversation that men might have among themselves in a male-dominated environment such as a hairdressers or a locker room. And there might not be a more qualified nation to invite the world's most powerful people to a convention like this, because Iceland has the best gender equality record in the world.
Iceland held the top spot for the sixth consecutive year in the Global Gender Gap Report 2014, an annual index of 142 countries released by the World Economic Forum. The UK, meanwhile, slid eight notches to 26th place, its lowest rank ever.
Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson, the foreign minister of Iceland, hopes that this UN summit will encourage governments and business leaders to follow his country's example and put women at the forefront of economic reforms.
Mr Sveinsson called gender inequality "a global problem" that is hindering economic growth. "It has been part of our development strategy for a long time," Mr Sveinsson said. "The reason our whole economy has been doing very well is because of the big part women are playing."
Since Iceland's economy plunged in the wake of its banking crisis and the global financial meltdown, shrinking 6.6pc in 2009 and 4.1pc the following year, its recovery has outpaced almost every other developed nation. Its economy expanded by 3.3pc in 2013 compared to growth of 1.9pc in the US and 1.7pc in the UK, and the International Monetary Fund expects Iceland's GDP growth to continue at an annual pace of around 3pc in 2014 and 2015. In November, Iceland's unemployment rate fell to a six-year low of 3.1pc, which is half the UK's 6pc.
Mr Sveinsson believes that Iceland's high female engagement in its labour force is one of the reasons the economy continues to perform well.
In Iceland, 71pc of adult women and 77pc of men work, according to World Bank data for 2013, although Iceland's own figures are higher. In both the UK and the US, labour force participation drops to just 56pc of women compared with 69pc of men, while Germany's is several percentage points lower.
But even Iceland has not managed to eradicate the gap between male and female earnings. The difference in income between men and women stands at around 18pc, which, although a couple of percentage points lower than it was in 2008, is still higher than the EU-wide average of around 16pc.
The UK's pay gap is even wider, despite its recent fall to a record low 19.1pc, while Germany's stretches as high as 22.4pc.
Mr Sveinsson identified this pay disparity as "the most important" economic glass ceiling facing Iceland's women today.
"The private sector must sit down and say: this is not acceptable," Mr Sveinsson said. And as women are vastly outnumbered in the corporate world, their male peers need to find the answer.
"It's for men and for guys to admit there is a problem – that they need to be part of the solution," Mr Sveinsson, who has five sons, said. "It's not hard to sit behind a desk in an office and say, 'This is not my problem'. This is our problem. It is not a woman's problem, it is a man's problem also."
The conference, which is co-hosted by Suriname, has divided opinion, with critics condemning the event for excluding women from the conversation about their own place in society.
Mr Sveinsson insisted that women will not be removed from the room or barred from participating, but the Barbershop Conference will focus on what role men can play in the battle for egalitarianism.
In Iceland, men have been part of the conversation for decades. The minister said the men of Iceland were served "a red card" in 1975, when 90pc of the country's female citizens went on a nationwide strike and some 25,000 women rallied at a protest in the capital city Reykjavik. The so-called "day off" was organised by a radical grassroots movement called the Red Stockings but came to be known by the male workers who had to fill the women's jobs that day as "the long Friday".
Five years later, Iceland's Vigdis Finnbogadottir became the world's first democratically-elected female president.
"An awakening in the UK would be very much called for," said Mr Sveinsson, and urged British politicians and business executives to "follow up and do something so we can see some changes".
Recalling the UK's eight-place slide down the World Economic Forum's gender equality index, the minister said: "You have to sit down and find out why. You have to change. [You should say], 'We have to do it – because we are going to beat Iceland'.