Stories of Women Who Lead: H.E. Katrín Jakobsdóttir

Katrín Jakobsdóttir served as Prime Minister of Iceland from 2017 to 2024, leading through a pandemic, a volcanic eruption, and a cost-of-living crisis, while navigating a political landscape that, in her words, was not built with her in mind. In conversation with Laura Liswood and young leader Nína Guðrún Geirsdóttir for the Stories of Women Who Lead series, Jakobsdóttir speaks with candor about the structural pressures women in leadership face, and her deliberate refusal to accommodate them.

Jakobsdóttir grew up in a household where equality was treated as a settled fact. Her father took time away from work to stay home with his children, something that was unusual in Iceland in the 1980s, as she recalls, “everybody thought that was extremely odd.” Her mother was openly feminist. The message at home was that girls and boys played on the same field.

That certainty did not survive her early twenties. Finishing college and entering the labor market, she began to notice what she had not seen before. “Gender equality had not been achieved,” she says simply. “I became a former feminist with every year.” The process of becoming politically engaged was also the process of learning how far the gap was between the values she grew up with and the institutions she was entering.

“There is no tolerance. There is a demand that women are more perfect, when it comes to not only politics, but also moral issues.”

The narrow line

From her first seat on Reykjavík's local council, to the parliament, to the Prime Minister's office, Jakobsdóttir encountered the same pattern: a standard applied to women that is simultaneously higher and less forgiving than for men. Former President Vigdís Finnbogadóttir had described it years before – no tolerance for women's mistakes – and Jakobsdóttir found it unchanged.

The scrutiny extended to the smallest signals. “I was criticized a lot for smiling too much,” she says. The solution, she was told, was to stop; nobody takes a woman seriously if she keeps smiling. But when circumstances required a harder edge, that too drew criticism. “When women get angry, that makes people uneasy.” The contradiction is the point: the space left for a woman to simply exist as herself in public leadership is, by design or default, very small.

She is careful not to frame this only as personal experience. Coming from a party with an explicitly feminist platform gave her a foundation others lack, “that was very helpful for me and my politics.” But even within that context, she says, “you always have to fight for every step.” And when she began participating in international fora, she discovered that what she had navigated in Iceland was relatively mild. “I realized that that was nothing compared to what other women around the world had encountered.”

On gender equality as a “soft” issue

One pattern she finds particularly frustrating is the reluctance among women leaders to speak directly about gender equality, a reluctance, she argues, driven by the fear of being dismissed as too narrow or too soft.

“I think they are afraid that they will be judged,” she says. “That equality and the status of women are something that's soft.”

She rejects this framing entirely. “Gender equality is about half of humankind. And it's about the human rights of that half. Nothing can be more tough, in my opinion.” The economic dimension is inseparable from the political: “The economy doesn't work if women are not participating. So it's also a core of economic policy.” To treat it as a personal interest or a secondary concern is, she suggests, a category error, and a convenient one for those who benefit from keeping it marginal.

Refusing the archetype

Among the expectations placed on women in high office, the one Jakobsdóttir names most clearly is the “mother figure”, the idea that a female head of government should occupy a particular emotional role, extending care and moral authority downward through an institution. She encountered this directly in the Icelandic Parliament. “I once said: I'm really not the mother of this minister,” she recalls. “And everybody was a little bit shocked.”

The broader point she is making is about how culture shapes perception before women even open their mouths. “We tend to put people in kind of boxes, we tend to define them from what we know from our culture.” Women in politics must constantly work against frameworks that pre-assign them a character, not because of who they are, but because of the limited templates available for female authority.

Her response was to refuse them. “I have always been very clear in my heart that I would not change,” she says. That included not changing how she dressed. When she became Prime Minister, she was criticized for failing to “dress the part.” She dressed as she liked. “Politics is a game created by men, and the rules are made by men,” she says. “It can be quite easy to enter the game, play by the rules, and forget that you did not create that game, that you have to do things differently.”

A backlash amplified

Jakobsdóttir is clear-eyed about the political moment. Progress on gender equality has never moved in a straight line, but what is different now is the infrastructure that amplifies it. Social media, she argues, has given a minority of voices reach and volume that distort how large those voices actually are. “The roots of those voices” are smaller than the noise they make suggests.

The mechanism is familiar: social and economic frustration finds targets, and women, along with immigrants, are assigned the role of culprit. The fact that women have entered the labor market, are achieving, and are visible, is reframed as the source of some social problem. “That's somehow a problem when we listen to those voices.”

Solidarity, she argues, domestic and international, remains the essential tool, alongside organization. “We need to be organized to counter these forces.” And the scale of the challenge now requires international solidarity, since the forces pushing back operate globally.

Confidence, formation, and what luck actually means

When Nína Guðrún Geirsdóttir asks whether her confidence was innate or acquired, Jakobsdóttir resists the dichotomy. It was shaped, she says, by parents who insisted on equal treatment, by role models who were visible early, by a society where, by the time she entered politics, women in leadership were not entirely absent.

“I saw women in leadership,” she says, and that visibility made what she was attempting feel possible. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was elected president in 1980, when Jakobsdóttir was four years old. 

Yet she is also honest that the internal work does not end. “I'm turning 50, and I still have to remind myself.” In her account, confidence is not a permanent acquisition. It is something that requires maintenance, a practice, not a destination.

She closes the conversation with Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk as her book of choice, a novel she returns to regularly for its portrait of a man finding inner peace amid the world's war, and for its unflinching exposure of the absurdities and atrocities of conflict. “I think it's a very relevant book still. Not least now, in times of war and conflicts.”

The Stories of Women Who Lead interview series, with interviewer Laura Liswood, Secretary General of the Council builds on decades of work by the Secretary General and the Council of Women World Leaders to document the experiences of women who have reached the highest levels of political leadership. By capturing these conversations, the series seeks to preserve the insights, challenges, and lessons learned from women presidents and prime ministers around the world.