Editor: The following report is an excerpt from the UN submission by the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, September 2008. The full report can be found at Women’s Inequality in Canada
Despite this economic prosperity, spending on equality-enhancing programs since the last reporting period has fallen sharply at both the provincial and federal levels of government. Canadian governments have cut away services that women rely on, introduced punitive and restrictive eligibility rules to control access to benefits, and made women’s lives harsher. The poorest women, who are most likely to be single mothers, Aboriginal, women of colour, women with disabilities, and seniors, are the most harmed.
26% of women with disabilities fall below the poverty line.
Women with Disabilities
Women with disabilities are poorer than their male counterparts, and every barrier is higher for them. For women with disabilities, access to employment is tenuous. Consequently income support programs, such as social assistance, and services, such as home care, are vital to their survival and flourishing. Women with disabilities have been hit particularly hard by cuts to social programs that have been introduced since 1995.
Canada has not enacted strong legislation that requires buildings and services to be accessible. To obtain accessible services and facilities, women with disabilities must file human rights complaints, which often take years to resolve.
Women with Disabilities
The unemployment rate for women with disabilities is higher than for their non-disabled counterparts, due to both personal and societal barriers to their employment.
• In 2001, 10% of women with disabilities in the labour force between the ages of 15 and 64 years were unemployed, compared with 5% of non-disabled women.
Access to employment for women with disabilities is often barred, or made complicated, by negative attitudes of employers towards making accommodations for a woman’s disability. Many women have invisible disabilities, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, arthritis, asthma, cancer, and multiple sclerosis, which involve fatigue and pain.
Resistance from employers to working out flexible employment arrangements, such as working at home or working flexible hours, diminish the ability of women with disabilities to participate in paid employment and to support themselves and their families.
Recommendation
The governments of Canada should introduce pro-active employment equity laws that require public and private employers to ensure that women gain equal representation in their workplaces, and in all job categories, and that workplace rules and practices include and accommodate women, in particular racialized and disabled women, so that they can work and earn as equals.
Welfare Rates for Lone Parents With One Child (81% women)
• In 2006, welfare incomes of single women averaged 40% of the poverty line, 61% for single women with a disability.
Housing for Women with Disabilities
There is a lack of safe, affordable and accessible housing for women and girls with disabilities. The 2007 Street Health in Toronto study discovered that the majority of people living on the streets of Toronto have chronic illnesses: three quarters have at least one mental or physical chronic illness. Women with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to homelessness, violence and exploitation and require accessible housing that is safe and affordable.
Women with disabilities have various needs in terms of accessibility. They need to have access to enter the premises if they are mobility impaired, and also be able to use the bathroom and kitchen facilities independently.
Recent studies have highlighted the housing needs of women with disabilities in Canada:
• Stienstra and Wiebe (2004) interviewed 8 women with disabilities in Winnipeg about their experience of housing at the end of their lives, and found that they felt unsafe and did not venture much outside, leading to a sense of isolation. Even in their homes they were unsafe due to poor maintenance, a lack of temperature control, or poor air quality;
Recommendation
The governments of Canada should build affordable and safe housing that is accessible to women with disabilities. In addition, existing homeless shelters and subsidized housing require funds to do renovations to attain better accessibility.
Human Rights
The Review Panel found that unrepresented complainants were rarely successful, and that “the practical result of no [legal] assistance would be to deny access.” The human rights complaint process is often complicated and requires expertise in order to argue a case successfully. The process can be impossible to navigate independently for complainants who do not speak an official language or have disabilities.
Vulnerability to Violence
Many social and economic factors make women particularly vulnerable to violence and unable to escape it. Women who are poor are at particularly high risk, as are young women and girls, women suffering from mental illnesses or addiction, women with disabilities and immigrant women.
Sheltering Women with Disabilities
Women with disabilities experience more abuse than women without disabilities because they are often highly vulnerable to those on whom they depend for care. They experience physical, financial, caregiver, and sexual abuse, as well as neglect. Women and girls who need physical attendant care for daily living tasks are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
Disabled Women’s Network Canada (DAWN Canada), a group which advocates for women with disabilities, surveyed shelters in 1990 and found that simple physical access was lacking, but even more dire was the lack of acceptance of women with mental illnesses. Many shelters did not want to take them because they were perceived as making too much trouble for shelter workers. DAWN Canada is currently undertaking a new national survey of women’s shelters across Canada to determine their accessibility to women with all types of disabilities—psychiatric, sensory, developmental, chronic illness and physical. The current survey also highlights the need for shelters to provide access to women with disabilities who have children, and to women who have children with disabilities.
Recommendation The governments of Canada should, through a co-ordinated plan, increase and provide sustained funding for women’s shelters, including in rural and northern regions. Women and their children in all parts of Canada who are fleeing violence should have access to safe, accessible shelters and to support services that are designed to assist them, in particular if they are Aboriginal women, women with disabilities, and/or immigrant, refugee, or trafficked women.
Leave a Reply