I'd like to thank you for the invitation to speak to you today about rural women and economic security. I'm currently the research director with Prairie Women's Health Centre of Excellence and was formerly the director of the Centre for Rural Studies and Enrichment, associated with the University of Saskatchewan.
Although many aspects of economic insecurity may be similar in urban and rural places, there are a number of factors that make it different. These would be such things as cultural and spatial invisibility—that is, poverty in rural areas is not concentrated and is not necessarily admitted—isolation, economic structure and restructuring, rural attitudes and culture, and the withdrawal of health and social services from rural areas.
That economic security is a growing problem in rural Canada is brought home by a report by the Canadian Association of Food Banks in 2003, which pointed out the irony of increasing numbers of people living in Canada's food-producing regions, and even food producers themselves, needing to use food banks.
I'm basing my remarks today on recurring themes from a number of studies I participated in, on rural child care, intimate partner violence in rural regions, the work of farm women in farm families, the new rural economy, the role of the public sector in rural Saskatchewan, and the work of women in the agricultural and forestry processing sectors. I'll focus on four areas, including women's opportunity for work in rural areas, income, family care, and agriculture.
In the context of women's work opportunities, employment for women in rural Canada is a necessity in order to maintain the family, care for children, and in many cases supplement farm income. Women able to earn a substantive wage give themselves and their families the option and security to live in rural communities and achieve a good quality of life.
Job opportunities available for women in rural communities are limited, particularly jobs that pay a decent wage. Rural women perceive that they have few options. Most of the jobs open to them are service sector jobs that have been traditionally held by women, jobs such as being waitresses, child care providers, nurses' aides, teachers' aides, or in secretarial and clerical positions. Traditional women's jobs that offer better pay—professional jobs such as teachers, nurses, and government jobs—are being lost from rural areas as schools and hospitals close and government offices are relocated into urban areas.
Traditional ideas about suitable work for women persist in some rural areas. Although this is slowly changing, occupational segregation remains, with women overrepresented in low-paying clerical and service sector jobs.
In terms of income, average wages in rural and small town Canada have been consistently lower than average wages in urban areas for decades, and the proportion of persistently poor tends to be highest in rural and small town Canada. Average wages are lowest for rural women, of all the groups we look at, and higher proportions of low-income women remain low income over time. This is often, actually, linked to low pay, so there are an awful lot of working poor in rural Canada. In rural Canada, even with one or two household members working, the chances of being low-income are higher than in urban areas.
Women told us that the jobs open to them are low-paying and part-time. Minimum wage jobs do not provide an adequate income for women to survive and pay for the day-to-day needs without being reliant on someone else to help pay the bills. This has implications for both the economic and the overall security of women, as the lack of financial resources limits women's options in abusive relationships, and single women can't support a family.
Women with small children find that the income from a minimum wage job would all go to day care, so it's not worth it. As a result, women may postpone going back to work because they can't afford the child care bills when working at minimum wage employment. Those years not working have an economic impact in lost wages, lost opportunities for advancement, and lost pension contributions, hindering economic security later in life.
On the topic of child care, for decades rural women have been telling researchers and government representatives that good quality, flexible child care is a critical need in rural Canada. Strategies to meet the child care needs of families in rural Canada are essential and must be specifically targeted to the rural areas in order for the programs and the money to actually get to rural, out of urban, areas. Child care is a critical economic development issue for present and future generations, and it's a necessity for women who want to increase their education or earn a wage.
In one of the most economically vibrant rural regions in Saskatchewan, there was only one licensed day care centre and one licensed day care home, which provided child care spaces for fewer than 1 in 50 of the children aged zero to twelve. So there's obviously a critical need for child care options in this rural region.
What parents do now is meet their child care needs by multiple means. They go to family, friends, older siblings; they work tandem hours, so that one parent is at home while the other is at work.
Parents want licensed child care. There's an assurance of safety and quality there, and it offers the opportunity for subsidy, which is critical in low- wage areas such as you find in so many of our rural areas.
Innovation around child care. You have an awful lot of families who are dealing with shiftwork, farm families and so on, who need non-traditional types of day care. The lack of access to quality early childhood development and care has a number of additional implications for women and families. It reduces the availability of people for the labour force, exacerbating a well-recognized rural regional labour shortage. Women turn down education and advancement due to their child care needs, and women end up travelling to multiple communities every day to drop off their children in one place and then go to work in another.
The affordability of child care is a significant issue for parents. Some note that with a minimum wage job they cannot afford to pay for child care. Funding for child care based on small subsidies and vouchers will not result in the provision of licensed child care options in rural Canada, so program funding needs to receive priority as new licensed facilities that offer quality child care are needed desperately.
Elder care is another element of family care that rural women are increasingly engaging in. With the aging population in rural Canada and the out-migration of family members, the rural women who remain are increasingly called on to provide elder care. In our study of the work of farm families over the period 1982-2002, 43% of farm women were providing care to elderly or chronically ill family and friends. This is an increase from under 10% in 1982. As others have noted, this impacts women's economic security, as they may be forced to reduced their work hours. It influences their job choices, their job mobility, as well as their health. These changes have shifted health care costs from the health care system to the household, and they're most often borne by women.
In the context of farm women, although many continue to discount the significance of agriculture in rural Canada, it's still an important sector. In Canada, the family farm remains the dominant form of agricultural production, and 98% of Canadian farms are still family farms. On many of these farms there are multiple people working full-time and part-time jobs in agriculture, and many of them are never counted in official statistics. Nevertheless, the family farm is undergoing dramatic change. Farms are becoming larger and fewer, and the number of Canadians engaged in agriculture has declined. Farm family members are increasingly working off the farm, work relations are changing on the farm, and transfers to the next generation of farmers are being called into question. This structural transformation of agriculture has meant that in Canada, most remaining farms are marginal units incapable of fully employing and sustaining farm families.
Farm families who choose to remain on farms are responding in a variety of ways. However, while this adaptation provides continuity to the farm family, it's not without significant cost to family, farm, and community.
Agriculture is also more than an economic sector. Farms and farm families contribute economically and socially to many local rural communities and are responsible for controlling land use on vast areas of land. The family farm is an important part of the rural landscape and a critical part of the survival of many small towns in rural Canada. The changes in agriculture have had significant social and economic impacts on farm families in rural communities that extend well beyond the agricultural sector.
Statistics Canada, in 2001, reported that only 17.7% of the average Canadian farm family's net income came from the farm. Even with the largest farming category with net receipts over $250,000, they derived 39.5% of their net income from the farm operation.
Women play a significant role in the economic security of the family farm, just as the viability of the farm affects the economic security of women. That the role of women in agriculture is still unrecognized and unacknowledged speaks to the persistence of the predominant view that agricultural work is done by men.
Between 1982 and 2002, farm women expanded their work roles over a broad range of farm work, moving into non-traditional female roles as they responded to the increased opportunities offered by social change and the increased pressure on the family farm created by economic and political change. Even as they expand these roles, they continue to do most of the domestic work. Responding to both opportunities and pressures, farm women are increasingly working off the farm.
Economic pressures in agriculture and opportunities in the oil and gas sector have also created an interesting situation in the prairies of men leaving the farms after harvest to work in the oil patch, returning in the spring before seeding, leaving women, children, and elderly relatives to manage the ongoing activities of the farm operation in their absence. And farming is a year-round activity; it doesn't stop after harvest.
Finally, women are intimately involved in the economic aspects of farming; 81% of them maintain the books and paperwork for the farms. They're increasingly working on the farm, replacing hired labour, and working off the farm, bringing in money to support the family and at times the farm operation.