‘I Feel Like the Most Important Thing Is to Ensure That Women Feel Included…’: Immigrant Women’s Experiences of Integration and Gender Equality in Iceland During Times of Crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Enabling gender equality by empowering women to fully engage in modern society is fundamental for building resilient and sustainable communities. While Iceland is recognized as a global leader in gender equality, the experiences of various immigrant groups can differ considerably, especially during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery. Given the rapid increase in the immigrant population in Iceland, it is crucial to gain a deeper understanding of the processes surrounding immigrant women’s integration strategies, with an emphasis on gender equality through the lens of intersectionality. The main objective of this qualitative study is to explore the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on female immigrants by examining how intersecting identities—including gender, ethnicity, religion, motherhood, and immigration status—shape their integration experiences in Iceland. Focusing on small, remote urban and rural communities in the Northeastern Region of Iceland (Norðurland eystra), this study draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with immigrant women conducted in 2022 and 2023, using both strength-based and deficit analyses. The study reveals key constraints and strengths in the integration of immigrant women, examined through the lens of underlying and pandemic-driven factors influencing immigrant women’s experiences in personal and social domains of integration. The findings indicate that, despite government gender equality standards and support programs, as well as the considerable resilience demonstrated by immigrant women during the pandemic, they continue to encounter significant barriers to achieving full integration. The findings suggest that acknowledging immigrant women as important constituents in policy development is a crucial step toward formulating and implementing more comprehensive, gender-responsive, and locally adaptive decentralized integration policies. Such policies are vital for securing Iceland’s long-term social sustainability and reinforcing its stature as a global leader in gender equality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".