Well, you guys keep bringing up Iceland as if it's some kind of global special case unicorn. I grew up in Denmark which sounds very similar to Iceland. Women in top political positions (president, speaker of the house, ... equivalent); pwning the majority of higher education, ... happiest nation, progressive paradise, check.
Of course, without hard data, it could mean I grew up in a [rural nerd] bubble
, but the fact that it took me quite a while to figure out WTH some [Americans] were going on about when they called me a sexist and made snide comments about my use of the word "businessman" or complained about my neglect of using "he or she" as
the generic pronoun in the early days after publishing the ERE book might indicate what a general non-issue certain things already were or had become where I grew up, compared to the US(*), insofar they ever were issues in the first place. Or it might indicate how idiosyncratic the US trajectory really is? Or how clueless I am? Or how things in the US will look half a century from now?
(*) And talking about the US as a whole as if e.g. Alabama and California are the same thing might be a mistake on its own.
(One pertinent fact about the language battle front of the gender culture wars is that while English doesn't have an impersonal pronoun (English writers can use "one", but it's kinda forced), Danish does(*). It's interesting to note that some Danish vocations used to have gender-specific nouns, e.g. chairman and chairwoman, say, ... whereas these days, both genders uniformly use whichever used to be the most prevalent by volume. For example, nursing used to be either "sygeplejer" (M) or "sygeplejerske" (F). In my "era", the former had already been downgraded to mean either specifically someone who was a medic in the armed services or a lower level orderly in a hospital. There's now no such thing as a "sygeplejer" anymore and both genders refer to themselves as "sygeplejerske" and think nothing about it (as far as I know)).
(*) And the word is "man" which has the original etymology of referring to a generic "homo sapiens" similar to how "human" refers to human person being ... and not a hu-male. Being conversant in more than just one single language might prevent such kinds of myopic mistakes/conclusions.
Maybe some of the Danes would weigh in? Since 2000, I only have remote-sensor data from newspapers, etc. Feminism is still a thing over there (or at least feminists still exist), but it seems to take its cue from the US wrt current concerns and trends, much like other social studies ... and general public interest peaked about 50 years ago. Maybe I'm inadvertently offending some people here ... I've read a few accounts of #metoo statements in the Danish papers, but there are AFAIK no public scandals at the level of the US (save one movie company ... and that wasn't taken seriously because they're notorious for being a bunch of weirdos---news coverage lasted only 2-3 days). In any case, nobody resigned, again AFAIK.
One [general sentiment] I remember back from 1994 (when it was my time) was how unfair it was for boys to get conscripted for military service at age 18 since it meant losing 1-2 years of career trajectory (and salary growth); whereas getting pregnant (which was the opposing argument for lost careers and salary) was voluntary and quite well covered by law (full salary for 6 months, I think it was at the time, not as generous as Sweden) and anyway didn't quite compare to involuntary government-service resulting in possible injury or death. Danish girls, at the time, could volunteer for the military, but that was very rare. Boys tried to avoid it (I avoided it) but some still volunteered for various reasons, like tradition, life-experience, character-building exercise, or simply not knowing where to go next after HS ... I know quite a few guys who volunteered even if they weren't drafted. I know no girls who volunteered. [The draft system has changed [twice?] since then, first eliminated, and now trying to reinstate it because of fear of Russia. The national strategy is currently to provide experts (think Army Ranger level) for various offensive military adventures far away from the country's borders instead of traditional defensive cannon-fodder to keep the Soviets (which no longer existed at that point btw) at bay for a few hours before getting overrun to buy the rest of NATO some mobilization time as was the idea in the 1990s] Norway, AFAIK, has a far more equal-opportunity/demand way of dying for your country, converging on Israeli IDF-level equality. (Any Norwegians, please verify.)
Anyhoo... conscription matters aside, from a dating point-of-view, my Danish experience is at least 3 Wheaton levels away from both what is considered a sexual assault in the US as well as 3 Wheaton levels away from the US-rules instituted to prevent such assaults. Living in the US, I'm so glad I'm married and FI already, so I don't have to navigate this on a practical level. Insofar I grew up in an "evolved society", US sexual, gender, and dating culture seems rather stone-age to me. Insofar I grew up in a "bubble", I apologize ...
In any case, Danish dating culture in my 1990s time (or space) was far more gender balanced. Both genders took initiative (equally as far as I could tell, but I'm not swamped with data points or social studies), but connecting ("making the trade" in my model terms) was still stymied by youthful cluelessness, as courting---also in the Nordic countries---is something adults leave youngsters to figure out on their own through trial and error, unlike, say, arranged marriages in other cultures with adult or at least parental assistance. There may be other solutions still, but in Nordic culture, gender matters or mattered far far less than it currently does in the US, even if youthful ignorance guides the overall dynamics in both cases.