A Swedish feminist party set fire to 100,000 kronor (€10,385, $13,087) worth of bank bills on Tuesday to protest the wage gap between men and women.

"What we are going to do here is that we will set fire to 100,000 kronor, and we will do this for fair salaries," Feminist Initiative (FI) leader Gudrun Schyman said in comments broadcast on Swedish public radio.

"One hundred thousand kronor is the amount women lose each minute when we have the system we have now, where salaries are set according to gender," she said.

Swedish public radio reported the bag full of 100-kronor notes, which took 40 minutes to burn, was donated by a public relations firm.

"It's not funny to set fire to money. I know it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money for me, and it's a lot of money for many others," Schyman told a radio reporter, adding she realised there was a long list of deserving charities the money could have gone to instead.

"But Feminist Initiative is a political party. We are not a charity, we work to change reality. The question we want to raise here, that we are burning for for, is salary discrimination," she said.

"We are so extremely provoked that our labour market still works in such a way that salary is determined by gender. In practice, women lose 100,000 kronor every single minute," she added.

A central bank spokesperson told the TT news agency that destroying bank notes was not illegal in Sweden.

Sweden's FI was founded in 2005 and presented its first candidates in the 2006 general elections. It did not win any seats in parliament.

Before creating FI, party leader Gudrun Schyman was the head of Sweden's formerly communist Left party.