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Conseil canadien de développement social Tel: (613) 236-8977 Fax: (613) 236-2750 E-mail: council@ccsd.ca Internet: www.ccsd.ca

Bringing Down the Barriers:
The Labour Market and Women with Disabilities in Ontario

by Gail Fawcett

     

Part B: Disability, daily life and the labour market

"I wake up every morning with a book of tickets; those tickets represent the energy that I have available to expend that day. Once the tickets are used up, I haven't any more energy. Living with a disability takes up more tickets than living without."

Not only does having a disability cost more money, it requires more energy. However, women and men often have different attitudes towards dealing with this. As well, women and men often have different options available to them.

The fatiguing nature of disability

In all of our focus groups, women and men stressed the fatiguing nature of many disabilities and the difficulty they faced performing routine daily tasks. Depending on the nature of their disability, such tasks may require significant amounts of time or may simply be beyond their capability.

As an example, for one female student in our focus groups, just entering the "fully accessible" university library required significant time and energy. First, she needed to find someone to alert a staff member to her presence. Then she needed to press a series of buzzers to open several doors, beginning at the back of the building in a dimly lit corridor. Library staff were not available for the full duration of library hours, meaning she had less time to work in the library and less energy to work with when she finally got there than her non-disabled counterparts.

Many focus group participants – women and men alike – also cited the lack of accessible washrooms as a major problem. Having to use a washroom in another building or several floors below one’s workstation was a common occurrence.

Another major problem identified was transportation. Having to plan one’s schedule and book a ride with para transit services at least 24 hours in advance does not permit the flexibility that many working people need. When meetings run late or unexpected workplace emergencies require working late on the spur of the moment, persons with disabilities are at a disadvantage.

Even when a person’s work schedule is planned in advance, para transit schedules vary. Often, transportation must be booked for a much earlier time than necessary because service can be very slow or unexpectedly fast. With no control over the speed of the service and no way to accurately predict it, many persons with disabilities are often forced to arrive at their destination much earlier than necessary. This, too, takes more time and energy than that demanded of persons without disabilities.

Typically, the demand for accessible transportation services far outstrips supply. In Ottawa-Carleton, for example, Para Transpo could not serve 40,000 of the one-way trip requests it received in 1997.²³

Child care

Women with disabilities who have children face an added dimension in getting to work – getting the children to child care. For women with disabilities, the need for affordable and convenient child care is as great, if not greater, than for women without disabilities. In our focus groups, women with young children mentioned that affordability and ease of access to child care would improve their employability.

"It would help a lot if an employer had a day care on the premises."

Across the province, women talked about problems in co-ordinating transportation with child care demands. In some areas, mothers needed to book two buses – one to take her and her children to child care and another to take her to work – with up to an hour of waiting time in between.

In the past in some areas, mothers were only allowed one passenger without a disability, leaving those who had two or more non-disabled children without transportation. As well, the number of trips permitted during a one-day period is often limited.²⁴ Many accessible transit services now try to use a single bus to accommodate mothers dropping children off at child care if the site is on the way to work. Despite these improvements, however, there are still problems.

"I can’t use Wheel Trans to take my son to day care because the day care hours are so inflexible that it just wouldn’t work with my schedule."

Inaccessible child care sites can further complicate this situation, particularly for lone parents with disabilities who have no one else with whom they can share the task. As well, having a lower income narrows the choice of child care facilities. Some women found that relatives and friends provided the least exhausting and most affordable arrangement.

Many of the women in our focus groups commented that being employed while their children were very young would have been impossible for them.

As shown in Table 11, female lone parents with disabilities and children under age 6 were the least likely of all groups to have held one job all year.²⁵ Just over one-quarter of these women held a job throughout the year, compared to over one-third of female lone parents without disabilities whose youngest child was under six.

Table 6: Percentage of employed women and men with and without disabilities who reported food shortages, aged 15 to 64, by occupational type, Canada, 1996
	Professional high-level managers	Semi-professional mid-level managers	Skilled workers	Semi-skilled workers	Unskilled workers
Women with disabilities	***	***	5.4%	18.5%	13.2%
Women without disabilities	2.6%	3.2%	3.9%	5.3%	6.0%
Men with disabilities	***	4.7%	11.4%	10.2%	11.1%
Men without disabilities	1.0%	2.2%	4.3%	5.9%	5.4%
***Unstable estimate due to small sample size.
Source: Prepared by the Canadian Council on Social Development using data from Statistics Canada's National Population Health Survey, 1996/97.

Generally, women are more likely to have stable employment as their children grow older, enter school, and child care requirements are reduced. But this trend is less likely to apply to women with disabilities. In particular, female lone parents don’t increase their rate of stable job holding until their children reach age 12.

Family responsibilities are a major concern

While the data seem to suggest that having young children affects the chances of women and men with disabilities finding stable employment to the same degree, a closer look at some of the reasons men and women give for not being employed in the paid labour force suggests that this is not really the case. Men with disabilities, regardless of the age of their children, were extremely unlikely to cite family responsibilities as their reason for not working.²⁶ Men were more likely to cite the disability itself, early retirement or a labour dispute as the reason they were not employed.

Among women, there is a more direct link between labour force patterns and having young children. The majority of women with and without disabilities who have children under age 6 and who live with partners list family responsibilities as the reason they are not working for pay. Women with disabilities who have children under age 6 and who live with partners cite family responsibilities as the reason for being out of the paid labour force just over half the time. Among women without disabilities who had partners and children under 6, family responsibilities were cited 89 per cent of the time.

When the youngest child is aged 12 or older, family responsibilities become less likely to be among the reasons women cite for not working for pay. Among women without disabilities who had a partner and whose youngest child was aged 12 to 24, 57 per cent cited family as their reason for not having a job.

Among women with disabilities who have a partner and whose youngest child was aged 12 to 24, 26 per cent cite family as the reason for not working. Disability and illness are more important in keeping this group out of the paid labour force. In addition, women with disabilities experience the demands of family responsibilities and child care along with their disability. The often fatiguing nature of disability, coupled with child care, can result in women with disabilities being even less likely than women without disabilities to work for pay while their children are very young.

Stress

Another indicator of the extra energy used up by women with disabilities is the level of stress in their lives. The measures of chronic stress contained in Table 12 clearly indicate that female lone parents with disabilities have the highest level of stress of any adult group.²⁷ Female lone parents with disabilities face tremendous barriers in all aspects of their lives. As well, women with disabilities in general have higher overall stress levels than any of the other groups, regardless of living arrangements.

Table 12: Average score for chronic stress,* women and men with and without disabilities, aged 15 to 64, by selected living arrangements, Canada, 1994
				Women		Men
				With disabilities	Without disabilities	With disabilities	Without disabilities
Unattached individual				4.68	3.18	4.36	3.37
Living with spouse or partner, no children				3.52	2.60	3.27	2.50
Living with spouse or partner and children under age 25				4.28	3.07	3.48	2.69
Lone parent of children under age 25				6.33	4.65	3.38	3.50
Living in family, aged 15 to 24				4.42	3.23	4.28	3.31
* This index is an adjusted measure of the level of overall stress experienced in everyday life. Stressors include activity overload, financial difficulties, problems in relationships in day-to-day encounters, with children, spouse, etc. The measure is adjusted as if all items are relevant to all persons.
Source: Prepared by the Canadian Council on Social Development using data from Statistics Canada's National Population Health Survey, 1994/95

Gender and household tasks

Persons with disabilities often must spend more time and energy at home than others do simply performing the required activities of everyday living. For example, men and women with disabilities both report spending more time doing basic housekeeping tasks than do their non-disabled counterparts. As shown in Figure 9, 54 per cent of women with disabilities reported performing 15 or more hours of housework each week, compared to 48 per cent of their non-disabled counterparts. Among men with disabilities, 31 per cent reported doing 15 or more hours of housework a week, compared to 22 per cent of their non-disabled counterparts.

Lone parents of children under 25 spend the most time performing household tasks. As shown in Table 13, men with disabilities were more likely to spend 15 or more hours a week on domestic labour than were their non-disabled counterparts within each type of living arrangement, but they were less likely to do this than women without disabilities and even less likely than women with disabilities.

Women with disabilities are clearly more likely than any other group to spend more time on unpaid household tasks, regardless of their living arrangements, leaving them with less time and energy to pursue paid employment. Those who try to do both increase their risk of becoming ill, which may result in their needing time off work or even losing their job entirely. The impact of this extra burden was echoed throughout our focus groups.

"I get exhausted working and doing things around the house. Then I am more likely to get really sick again."

"I do all my own housework, but it takes me 10 times longer than it did before I was in a wheelchair."

While women and men with disabilities in our focus groups both acknowledged the impact of household tasks on their time and energy, they often displayed different attitudes toward coping with them. Generally, men displayed a very practical attitude.

"For a person with a physical disability like mine, the best use of my time is not housework. I’m better off having an able-bodied person do that while I use my intellect – that’s my strength."

"Even if you could manage to do housework by yourself, it would take considerably more time – it’s a time-saving device to be assisted."

Women, on the other hand, often felt guilty for not being able to perform housework. Others seemed to accept that they were responsible for doing housework, even if they were employed.

"Some days I have difficulty doing the housework, but I force myself to do it. I am too proud to ask for help and partly feel ashamed of admitting I need help."

"I used to get up really early and go to bed late at night. I did all the housework myself, had three part-time jobs, and sewed on the side. But now, with my husband (who also has a disability), I have to have assistance. I couldn’t work otherwise."

Participants in all the focus groups recounted stories of being turned down or having services cut back by provincially funded home care services that provide assistance with certain household tasks. When this happens, women may be less likely than men to appeal, since they often tend to feel guilty about not being able to do the work in the first place. Our focus group responses suggest that when these services are reduced, women may be more likely than men to try to shoulder the load alone.

Who gets help with housework?

In 1991, women with disabilities were less likely than their male counterparts to have received assistance with various household chores.²⁸ As shown in Figure 10, three-quarters of men with disabilities had help preparing meals, while less than three in 10 women had such help.

More than 70 per cent of men with disabilities receive help preparing meals, regardless of the severity of their disability. In comparison, only one-quarter of women with mild disabilities receive such help. Even among women with a severe disability, less than 50 per cent receive help preparing meals.

This does not mean that women do not need help. Women with disabilities were more likely than their male counterparts to report that they required assistance with meal preparation due to their disability. But only about half of these women had sufficient help, one-quarter had only a portion of the help they needed, and a final quarter had no help at all.

Among men with disabilities who required assistance with meal preparation, just over half had sufficient help, about two in five had only a portion of the help they needed, and less than one in 10 had no help at all.

How do living arrangements affect household tasks?

Living arrangements are important in determining whether women and men with disabilities receive help with daily household tasks such as meal preparation. The majority of both women and men with disabilities who live alone prepare their meals without help. However, the majority is larger for women than for men. Among those with disabilities who lived alone, men were more likely than women to have had partial help preparing meals. Nine per cent of men had partial help preparing meals, compared to 4 per cent of women. In addition, 7 per cent of men had meals prepared for them, compared to 2 per cent of women.

Although living with others provided a greater opportunity for women with disabilities to share meal preparation and to have others prepare all the meals, more than two-thirds of women with disabilities living with others still performed their meal preparation alone. Men with disabilities, on the other hand, were far more likely to benefit from living with others. While 84 per cent of men living alone prepared their own meals, only 18 per cent of those living with others did so.²⁹

Women with disabilities from various ethno-racial backgrounds had a dual-sided view of this subject. Some felt that their cultural traditions increased their workload, since they were often required to perform household tasks for other family members.

"I have to do all of the housework, even selecting my husband’s clothes. That’s the way his mother trained him."

In other cases, family members living together were able to pool their abilities to accomplish what needed to be done.³⁰

"When I lived with my sister, my niece and my daughter, they used to help me with toileting or whatever I needed. I never washed the dishes because I couldn’t reach the counter, but I used to chop the salad and peel the carrots. They helped me and I helped them."

In addition to the possibility of help with household tasks, the women in most of our focus groups mentioned that the real value in having other adults in the household was more widespread. In some instances, family members provided transportation that was vital to their working or looking for work.

"If we didn’t have my father driving us to work, neither my husband nor I would be working."

Women in every group talked about the importance of self-esteem. Those who had support from a spouse, parent, sibling or support group noted that this boosted their self-confidence and made a difference in their ability to get and keep a job.

"You feel more confident when you have others in the home because you have someone you can depend on."

"Women with disabilities have lots of problems with self-esteem. This makes it difficult to find a job and hard to speak well about yourself during an interview. If you have someone supportive at home, you are much more confident."

Some women noted that the focus group session itself made them feel better about themselves, highlighting the need for women with disabilities to have access to discussions and support groups where they might have the opportunity to meet other people, share their experiences and boost their self-confidence. Such groups are also important for sharing information regarding available programs and supports. Many of our participants noted that they often find out about programs and supports by accident.

"You have to move to where the services are and find out what you have available. You have to share knowledge about resources, even in groups just like this. The networking really helps. You have to get the word out."

The exchange of helpful information can often be more problematic for visible minority women with disabilities and for those whose first language is not English. In our focus group of Franco-Ontario women, language was not identified as significant a problem as it often is for French-speaking women with disabilities in other locations. This is likely because these women were living in a predominantly French-speaking community and a non-urban area. There were few formal supports and services available to these women in any language. For this group, most of the supports and services they received were informal. They relied mostly upon relatives, friends, and helpful neighbours for their supports.

"It’s very common for Francophones who become disabled to find themselves learning how to cope with a disability and learning a new language all at the same time. They often find that they have an easier time finding out what is available and accessing supports and services if they can speak English."31

For some visible minority women with disabilities, both linguistic and cultural differences can act as a barrier to information about the services that might be available.³²

Does household assistance help women find a job?

For women and men with mild and moderate disabilities, help with household tasks increases their chances of finding a job, as the figures show.³³

"I’ve been working full-time for the last 20 years. Because of my disability, I qualified for paid assistance with housework. In addition to having a husband who does a lot of work, I have someone else who comes in and helps. The reason I have the ability to work is that we have the time and energy. For those with disabilities, fatigue is often a problem. Often you don’t have time for a job if you’re doing all your own housework as well."

"When I decided to go back to school, they said that if I could do that, I could do housework. I lost my homecare."

Women and men in our focus groups said they had encountered difficulties in getting help with household tasks. However, men often seemed to have more options available to them to cope with the problems.

"If you’ve got the money it’s better to hire your own help. I don’t need the red tape and rules that go with homecare."

In some instances, they reported that the most effective way to cope was to modify their living spaces.

"I do get assistance with housework, but if I had more modified living quarters, that would alleviate the services that I do get – I could do more of the work on my own. I need better housing."

 

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