PM blasts IKEAPrime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik is astonished by Swedish furniture giant IKEA's view of women and wants the company to start depicting women building furniture in their assembly instructions.
IKEA has about 2,000 products that need diagrammed instructions to assemble, and not one of these sheets shows a woman tackling the problem of putting Swedish flat-packed furniture together, newspaper VG reported.
Bondevik calls IKEA's stance "untenable", and was unimpressed by the explanation offered.
"We have over 200 warehouses around the world and have to take cultural considerations into account. In Muslim countries there is a problem using women in instructions," IKEA's information chief Camilla Lindemann told VG.
"That's not good enough. Promoting attitudes of equality is at least as important in Muslim countries. They should just change this," Bondevik told VG.
The prime minister not only had support from Progress and Labor party politicians, who shared both his argument and his skepticism of the explanation.
Newspaper VG failed to find any Muslims who understood IKEA's policy. At an immigrant café in Oslo, Muslim men from various nations could not fathom the problem.
"Muslim women can also put furniture together," said Bajram Acar, who could not see how pictures of industrious women would offend customers in Turkey.
"It is not the case that there is Taliban rule in all Muslim countries. Islam is not the way it was in Afghanistan. Women can study, they can do anything," Fahrid Ismail of Jordan told VG.
Later on Thursday IKEA's Swedish information chief Fredrik Wahrolén said that examples of assembly instructions depicting women did exist
Wahrolén said a woman could be seen putting kitchen shelf "Värde" together, as well as helping build the cabinet "Husar". Wahrolén said that company would do better and try to have a more equal division.
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