New Report: Making Women with Disabilities Visible in Canada’s Care Economy
Women with disabilities and Deaf women are everywhere in Canada’s care economy – as mothers, family caregivers, peer supporters, paid care workers, and people who themselves need care and support. Yet their contributions, needs, and experiences remain largely invisible in public policy.
New Society Institute’s new report, “We Are Always Leading, Supporting, Teaching”: Women with Disabilities and Deaf Women’s Unrecognized Care Needs and Work in Canada, developed with the collaboration of Human Rights Watch, brings those experiences into view. Drawing principally on eight focus groups involving 49 women, the research documents restrictive eligibility rules, fragmented and under-resourced services, inaccessible transportation, poverty, inadequate housing, relentless demands for self-advocacy, and the enormous amount of paid and unpaid care work women with disabilities undertake without adequate recognition or support.
But the report goes beyond documenting barriers. It asks how the laws, policies and programs that structure Canada’s care economy can be assessed—and changed. It proposes a new human-rights-based framework for making this complex policy regime visible, identifying gaps and contradictions, and guiding sustained reform.
The research was undertaken by New Society Institute and Human Rights Watch and made possible through funding from Human Rights Watch Canada, with the support of The Slaight Family Foundation.
