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Mar 2022
8m 17s

We travel to Iceland with its first lady...

NPR
About this episode
There is an Icelandic word, sprakkar, that means outstanding women - and those women are at the heart of the book Secrets Of The Sprakkar: Iceland's Extraordinary Women And How They Are Changing The World. Iceland's first lady and author, Eliza Reid, interviewed women from all walks of life to find out what makes being a woman in Iceland so great. Reid told NPR's Leila Fadel that not everyone knows Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Equality Index for the past 12 years, so she set out to change that.

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