Women in the World of Work
By Wendi Winter and Charlotte Duval-Lantoine
The world is in constant motion. The advance of new technologies, increased automation, the acceleration of globalization, and the growth of the gig economy are changing every aspect of one’s life, including the world of work.
How will those changes impact workers? What are the gendered implications of this evolution?
In July 2020, the United Nations Human Rights Council released the report “Women’s human rights in the changing world of work: Report of the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls”. In their report, the working group takes a thematic approach to analyze women’s roles and participation in the workforce throughout the world. By exploring the issue of automation, the advance in information and communication technologies, demographic change, globalization, and environmental crises, the working group highlights how women will be the first victims of the negative effects of these changes. However, it offers hope that governments can alleviate, if not mitigate, the drawbacks of these evolutions.
But policies will need to pay attention to women’s rights, and keep in mind the importance of intersecting identities (class, race, sexual orientation, disability).
While the report highlights the importance of women’s participation in the economy, it fails to consider additional intersectionalities of our lives and identities. One of those major intersectional factors is location. The working group, by focusing its attention to issues in the developing world, tends to perpetuate the notion that gender-based violence in the workplace is mainly a global south issue. Poverty is a critical factor in one’s experience with violence, but a country’s development does not determine its population’s experience with gender-based violence.
This failure to consider the intersectionality of women’s lives is problematic, as decision-makers in the global north/ developed countries will continue overlooking working women in their own nations that struggle with real and serious hurdles.
The Canadian government has implemented a Gender-Based Analysis + (GBA+) approach that aims to consider how policies and initiatives will affect women, men, and people of gender diverse backgrounds before they are enacted. This recent consideration of how policies affect different groups of people, while a good start, has yet to be executed effectively.
GBA+ can only work if governments are able to reflect on how their current policies, not just their future ones, affect the population. Governmental employees need to be aware of how they are framing policies and who will be affected by them. In doing so, they need to research and analyze the potential negative effects of their decisions ahead of time. GBA+ changes should be preemptive, not reactive. They should be enacted by aware, socially conscious governments rather than retroactively added due to pushes from the affected populations.
Here are elements where the importance of conducting GBA+ when thinking of workers’ protection is critical.
First and foremost, migrant workers are one of the most vulnerable working populations in Canada. The pandemic and COVID-19 have made them especially vulnerable with employers refusing to allow their workers to leave the farm leading to decreased access to healthcare for the workers.
Recent outbreaks across Ontario farms have highlighted and exacerbated the injustices migrant workers face. Migrant workers have little to no access to healthcare, sometimes do not speak the language of the country, and do not know/understand their rights. The Canadian government needs to address the power imbalance between migrant workers and employers in their future policies.
Gender-based violence in the world of work does not exclusively impact populations in poverty. Women journalists, and particularly racialized ones, are at the frontlines of unwarranted attacks, pushback, and vitriol.
In October 2020, Global News host Supriya Dwivedi resigned after having received hate mail and threats of sexual assault that even targeted her 17-month old daughter. These continued assaults did not just come from a “vocal few.” They were also encouraged by the outlet for which she worked who failed to protect her. Global News did not act on her complaints pointing out how some of her colleagues spread disinformation about visible minorities. Worse, Corus Entertainment’s lawyer wrote in a letter that her concerns were unwarranted and that the outlet did its best to protect her. The letter even suggested that she was unfit to work in “talk radio as practiced in North America.”
In response to Ms. Dwivedi’s claims, Corus Entertainment said that the company did not engage in any type of disinformation, and that they are committed to protecting their hosts’ freedom of expression.
However, Ms. Dwivedi’s accusations include themselves in allegations from former Corus employees claiming that the company’s corporate culture allowed racist microaggressions, problematic coverage, and that they retaliated on those who spoke out.
Such a difficult working environment is not limited to Corus, and Ms. Dwivedi is not the only one to have experienced it. You can read a deeper dive on the reality of being a black woman in the media, written by Kathleen Newman-Bremang, here.
Those examples might appear anecdotal, but they are a reality in Canada. Status of Women Canada has staggering statistics, and Canadian Women’s Foundation underlines how gender-based violence can be exacerbated when intersecting with race, and Egale has written a report on violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Even the United
Nations has created an interactive infographic to highlight the impact of those intersecting identities.No matter their career or socioeconomic status, women continue to face gender-based violence and discrimination in the workforce. Even in Canada, a country touted for pushing for equality, women are still not safe. While we dream of a day where violence is no longer a reality of workplaces, we know that globally there is a lot of work left to do.
Resource:
If you are interested in learning more about gender-based violence in the world of work, the 16 Days Campaign put together an interesting report, particularly focused on the informal economy:
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