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Organisers hope the women’s strike – whose confirmed participants include fishing industry workers, teachers, nurses and the PM, Katrín Jakobsdóttir – will bring society to a standstill to draw attention to the country’s ongoing gender pay gap and widespread gender-based and sexual violence.
Third world country used to mean a country that wasn’t on the side of either the US or the USSR during the Cold War. Not sure what it means now.
In regular parlance it very quickly came to mean countries that are very underdeveloped, with high levels of poverty, simply because this tended to map quite closely to non-alignment.
Unless you’re reading something about cold war geopolitics, most use of the term takes this casual meaning, though you can usually get confirmation of what is meant from context.
I don’t see it used as much as in the past.
First world countries are developed on an industrial level and a cultural level for personal liberties and democracy. The US, most of Europe, Japan, etc. are all first world countries. Second world are developed industrialy but not so democratically. China and Russia are good examples. Third world countries are those underdeveloped industrially and democratically. Most of Africa and countries in turmoil like Venezuela are good examples of third world countries.
This is how it is used colloquially (though I have never heard the term second world country), but goes contra to the actual definition of the word.
I much prefer the term developing country, because it conveys what you actually want to describe in the first place.