The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people experience significant disability, which represents 1 in 6 people in the world’s population. December 3 is recognized and celebrated annually as the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, first proclaimed in 1992 by the United Nations to promote an understanding of disability issues and mobilize support for the dignity, rights, and well-being of persons with disabilities. This year’s theme is “Fostering disability-inclusive societies for advancing social progress.” A Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant funds the Live Work Well Research Centre’s Engendering Disability-Inclusive Development – Genre, handicap et développement inclusif (EDID-GHDI) partnership, which focusses on pursuing rights and justice of and with diverse women and girls with disabilities. This blog describes research done by the EDID-GHDI Canada research team to understand better the experiences and stories of women with disabilities.
On December 3, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, many governments will be telling the story of how their policies include people with disabilities. But our research challenges what and how the story is often told for diverse women with disabilities.
Put most starkly, women with disabilities, who make up 30 percent of all women in Canada, have lower employment rates and are more likely to live in poverty than non-disabled women or men. These gaps have serious consequences for their involvement with income policies, gender-based violence prevention measures, child care programs, and transportation systems, among many other policy areas. But how we tell the story of women with disabilities will determine what policy changes are identified and whether women with disabilities are imagined as helpless victims in a system not built for them or innovative participants contributing to rethinking policy directions. Our research on livelihoods with women with disabilities demonstrates that the victim story has too often been told, and we need to tell the stories of how diverse women with disabilities survive and thrive in order to build better policy responses. Beyond employment, disabled women’s labour often sustains families, communities, and cultural continuums. These are forms of work that are economically indispensable yet statistically invisible.
The victim narrative should be familiar to many. It goes: women with disabilities don’t fit easily into the employment world and need government or charitable help to let them survive. It focuses on employment participation rates that are lower than for women without disabilities and get steadily lower the more complex or severe their disabilities are. Of course, this is just part of the story. The plot also includes that they earn lower employment income than other non-disabled women or men; they rely more than most people on government income programs; and they face high rates of gender-based violence alongside low access to supports to address this violence and more limited access to justice in the context of violence. All in all, it is a story of women who are portrayed as vulnerable and in need of charity or saving.
But that isn’t the only story. Instead, women with disabilities told us a second story. One where they are building their own lives with and in their communities — having goals, making choices, recognizing and addressing barriers, and doing their very best not just to survive but to thrive.
Our team uses a livelihoods framework, where livelihoods are understood as the means by which people secure the necessities of life, and the framework takes more into account than just employment statistics. We conducted research with 63 diverse women with disabilities across Canada to understand how women with disabilities move from their dreams and goals to survive and thrive, to explore what is possible, make decisions and choices based on the barriers and opportunities they face and, in the end, engage in livelihood activities that include paid work, volunteering, bartering, artistry, market gardening, care provision, and many other areas.
The women we spoke with in our research told us that the story of them as victims reinforces old stereotypes. It doesn’t recognize them as the main character within their own stories, or value their experiences and knowledge. For example, one non-binary Métis person from Nunavut suggested that “what’s important to me is that people understand and respect who I am as a person and not who they think I am as a person or the label that they put on me.” A non-binary Queer person who immigrated to Canada living with mental health disabilities and ADHD asserted “I have so many other things that describe how I live, how I perceive life that are a lot more descriptive of who I am than my job title.”
The diverse women with disabilities across Canada that we spoke with said their choices about livelihoods were shaped by their access to the necessary services and supports, adequate and accessible housing, and food security. Intersectional inequities like colonialism, racism, queerphobia, and rural isolation intensify disability-related barriers. Barriers can limit choices, as one woman with disabilities in Newfoundland and Labrador noted: “I would love to leave Newfoundland and pursue a BA in another province but there are barriers to such: I worry about finances and barriers to housing.” Another young, racialized woman with mental health and learning disabilities argued that she needs to be “financially secure so I can map out my future better.”
For many women with disabilities, making choices is complicated in part because true choice requires not only access to income, housing, and food security, but also access to education and peer support to identify possibilities. One first-generation Canadian woman with learning and communications disabilities noted “participating [in] workshops help me to stay motivated and fulfill a meaning in life at home.” Pre-employment support programs were critical for some young women with disabilities because they weren’t sure they could contribute: “I was feeling hopeless, I needed to believe that I could succeed despite my barriers.”
With the right foundations and supports, diverse women with disabilities are able to contribute, although how they do it is often invisible because our statistics primarily measure formal employment. The women we spoke with talked about their other livelihoods, including advocacy, arts and culture, providing care, and volunteering. One woman from Nunavut noted “I am learning to sew, my mom makes parkas and she is teaching me to make one, I want to make them and sell them one day but it’s hard, so much work but it’s amazing to see design in the parka and try to make it fit people.” These contributions remain unrecognized as contributions to Canada’s economy and society suggesting the problem is not disabled women, but a policy landscape built on the belief that certain types of productivity indicate value.
What policy directions and insights come from using a livelihoods approach?
- Employment as a policy measure is inadequate to include women with disabilities and makes their contributions invisible. National statistics need to illustrate other livelihood activities which are disaggregated at minimum by gender and disability. Canada should develop national disability livelihood metrics that count informal work, creative work, care work, and land-based practices, not just employment income.
- Housing, income, and food security are foundational to livelihood activities and need to be seen as part of a wholistic policy response. Universal basic income programs and national accessible housing strategies will help.
- Policy measures should address pre-employment supports, formal and informal education, and peer support as essential to supporting livelihood choices and decisions. Funded peer-led employment and entrepreneurship programs will help.
- Policy makers can publicly recognize and celebrate the livelihoods contributions of diverse women with disabilities to Canadian society and shift the story about women with disabilities to recognize their important and innovative contributions.
Authors:
- Deborah Stienstra, Jarislowsky Chair in Families and Work and Professor, Political Science, University of Guelph
- Kathryn Currie Reinders, Ph.D. candidate in Social Practice and Transformational Change, University of Guelph
- Nashwa Lina Khan, Senior Research Associate, DisAbled Women’s Network of Canada
