(CSF2) Confronting Work-Family Inequalities Under Precarity
Thursday Jun 20 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm (Eastern Daylight Time)
Trottier Building - ENGTR 2100
Session Code: CSF2
Session Format: Paper Presentations
Session Language: English
Research Cluster Affiliation: Critical Sociology of Families, Work, and Care
Session Categories: In-person Session
Family care work and paid employment are interconnected to shape individual well-being and social inequalities. What impacts do contemporary changes, such as precarious employment, rising living costs, and neoliberal social policies, have on the everyday lives of diverse families and intersectional inequalities in the work-family domain? This session invited papers that examine the patterns, causes, and lived experiences of work-family inequalities in the contexts of social precarity and a retreating state. The research featured in this session will offer insights into policies and practices that aim to achieve work-family justice and build collective sustainable futures. Tags: Equality and Inequality, Parenting And Families, Work And Professions
Organizers: Yue Qian, University of British Columbia, Manlin Cai, University of British Columbia, Lesley Frank, Acadia University, Jason Webb, BC First Nations Justice Council
Presentations
Kayla Benjamin, University of Toronto; Anna Kuznetsov, University of Toronto; Daniela Ugarte Villalobos, University of Toronto
Childcare in Canada: An exploration of progress and gaps in access and quality
Canadian federalism has previously limited opportunities for a coherent national childcare policy, resulting in a patchwork childcare infrastructure and policy across each of Canada’s provinces and territories. This has led to significant childcare access and quality issues across the country. In 2021, the federal government announced its intention to address these concerns by establishing a Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system. The CWELCC includes the ambitious aim of national subsidized childcare. By 2026, the federal government has committed to working with provincial and territorial governments to reduce childcare costs to an average of $10 per day. Using data from a large, representative survey of 1000 Canadian primary or shared caregivers who provide care to children aged 15 or younger (completed in 2022), as well as follow-up interviews with a sub-sample of 46 caregivers across Canada (completed in 2023), we identify gaps between the current childcare infrastructure and policy in Canada and the realities of unpaid caregivers. Our analysis is guided by the Intersectional-Based Policy Analysis (IBPA) framework. IBPA is an application of intersectionality, a framework rooted in Black feminist thought which encourages critical reflection to transform research beyond the study of singular categories and towards an analysis of interlocking systems of oppression (Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1989). IBPA is distinguished in its potential to drive equity-promoting policy analyses and recommendations (Hankivsky et al. 2014). Gender, for example, is often given priority in studies exploring unpaid care work. However, simultaneously considering other institutions and structures—such as race and class—can more accurately explain persistent social inequalities and thus inform more effective policy interventions. The IBPA framework consists of a set of guiding principles (Equity, Intersecting Categories, Multi-level Analysis, Power, Reflexivity, Time and Space, Diverse Knowledges, and Social Justice) and a list of overarching questions spanning a descriptive and transformative phase of analysis. A relevant subset of these questions has been used to guide our policy analysis (Descriptive: What is the policy ‘problem’ under consideration?; How are groups differentially affected by this ‘problem’?; What are the current policy responses to the ‘problem’? and Transformative: Where and how can interventions be made to improve the problem?; What are feasible short, medium and long-term solutions?; How will proposed policy responses reduce inequities?). For the purpose of our paper, the policy problem is access to ‘quality’ childcare. In both the survey and interviews, caregivers were asked to assess the quality of the paid childcare they use for the child(ren) they care for and to discuss what quality childcare means to them. As such, access to ‘quality’ childcare was assessed according to the participants’ perspectives and shared experiences. We find that while many caregivers have benefited from lower childcare fees under the early adoption of the CWELCC, some families do not have access to participating childcare facilities. Issues of access to CWELCC-subsidized childcare include lengthy waitlists (sometimes spanning years), geographical barriers, lack of flexibility in childcare schedules (e.g., no accommodation of caregivers with nontraditional work schedules or part-time family support), and financial considerations. As such, some caregivers are forced to quit paid employment or reduce work hours, and report increased mental health challenges (e.g., stress, anxiety, depression, and trouble sleeping). In addition, some caregivers choose to rely on unpaid care arrangements or use unlicensed childcare facilities, which are not part of the CWELCC system. These decisions, often reinforced by issues of access, are also motivated by a lack of services for children with mental or physical disabilities, concerns around the quality or flexibility of paid care services, and parenting beliefs/philosophies. We conclude this paper with policy recommendations for improving the CWELCC system. As well, we present opportunities for further strengthening Canada’s national care strategy to better serve unpaid caregivers, particularly those who experience multiple, intersecting systems of oppression.
Non-presenting author: Ito Peng, University of Toronto
Elisabeth Rondinelli, Saint Mary's University; Lesley Frank, Acadia University; Jane Francis, Acadia University; Ruby Harrington, Acadia University
The United Nations Sustainability Goal of Zero Hunger is targeted to “end hunger and ensure access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations, INCLUDING INFANTS, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food by 2030” [1]. Yet research on infant food insecurity in high income settings reveals current threats to all mode of infant feeding that are rooted in weak income and social protections [2]. Exacerbating this, in February 2022, the Michigan-based Abbott Nutrition factory, a key infant formula producer, temporarily shuttered instigating a crisis-level formula shortage in the United States. It wasn’t long before the U.S. shortage arrived in Canada in its own fashion. Despite government measures to stabilize supply and health authorities’ advice to families, there was an absence of practical and timely solutions for families in both countries. Converging with record high food inflation and rising rates of household food insecurity, the evidence shows that we are moving further away from the Zero Hunger target. How did mothers and other caregivers experience, think about, and cope with the formula shortage? What were the social relations at play, and how did they complicate or facilitate families’ everyday lives? Guided by instiutional ethnography as an overarching methodologcal approach [3] married with digital ethnographic methods and visual storytelling, our project seeks to advance knowledge about infant food insecurities, specifically the infant formula shortages everyday impact on families lives in North America. This presentaion will share findings from the first phase of our project that mapped 500+ ‘Finding Formula’ Facebook groups that were created (primarily by mothers) across North America to cope with this feeding crisis and offer mutual aid to others. Based on 15 interviews with group administrators (5 in Canada, 10 in the US) conducted in the fall of 2023, we detail an exorbitant amount and array of inventive and collaborative carework to feed babies. This included foraging for formula (across retail, state services, from health practitioners, and through informal networks across international borders), distribution to those in need (personal deliveries, shipping, and developing transportation networks), online group management (responding to posts, developing and moderating rules, navigating scammers), public awareness and advocacy campaigns, media work, volunteer coordination, and emotional labour. Facebook groups and those that administered them, were even part the official advice of health authorities and government agencies for where to turn when you cannot find the formula you need. This work reveals how mothers, and others, used social media and their unpaid work offline (often while maintaining paid employment), to provide a social safety net that was informal, voluntary-based, and local, yet highly organized and networked. This moral economy of care became essential for infant food access when public policy and industry failures undermined caregivers’ ability to feed their infants through regular channels across socio-economic divides. Yet these same mothers warn us that little has changed to prevent such problems from continuing, and that long term strategies are needed for infant food security.
Non-presenting authors: Merin Oleschuk, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Arieilla Pahlke, Independent Consultant
Fauzia Husain, Queen's University
Frontline jobs require onerous time commitments from workers. In the Pakistani context, women cops, health workers, and airline attendants do not work regular 9 to 5 hours. They work nights and weekends and are often compelled to work overtime. Their demanding jobs make it impossible for them to fulfill their domestic work, which is still largely seen as a woman’s responsibility in this context. Meanwhile, neoliberalism keeps amping up the pressures on working-class women to work longer and longer hours in the face of an increasingly precarious economic situation in Pakistan. To manage the impossible double bind of balancing demanding jobs with demanding domestic duties, women come up with various strategies. In this paper, I focus on one that I call “the sacrificial daughter.” For many women working full-time frontline jobs, a young daughter or younger sister serves as a sacrifice to their mother/elder sister’s job. These young girls are kept out of school and other developmental activities and trained to cook, clean, and watch over younger siblings. Their sacrifice enables their mother/sister to continue to work. Some frontline women serve as sacrificial daughters themselves, forgoing marriage, or personal development in order to fund the education and development of siblings who have no other source of support. Finally, some frontline women offer themselves up as sacrificial daughters by agreeing to be second wives to men who already have families, such an arrangement makes it possible for them to maintain their support for their natal family while also obtaining the respectability and protection of marriage. The paper considers these different strategies women adopt to manage impossible work-life demands and examines the theoretical implications of their choices for the literature on work-family balance.
Umay Kader, The University of British Columbia
How do we define, measure, and theorize gender divisions of paid and unpaid work? In the case of new immigrant families, are there particularities of transnational identities and cultures that need to be incorporated into how we research tasks and responsibilities for household work, care work, and family provisioning? This paper is rooted in a larger cross-national project that includes a national survey (with almost 5000 participants) and a qualitative research project (with 88 households and 155 participants) on gender divisions and relations between unpaid work and paid work in diverse families. Our paper draws on interviews with new immigrant families that we conducted using the Care/Work Portrait (Doucet and Klostermann, 2023), a visual participatory method for exploring how individuals and couples navigate and negotiate all the work that goes into running a household. Sixteen individuals from Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, India, and Singapour participated in seven couple and two individual interviews. Our team-based data analysis used an adapted version of the Listening Guide approach to narrative analysis. Feminist care ethics, care economies, research on emotional and cognitive labour and responsibilities, and a rethinking of the field of gender divisions of labour with and through these theoretical perspectives (e.g., Doucet, 2023) form the theoretical foundation for this paper. In this paper, we make three arguments: (1) Housework and care work tasks and responsibilities are relational, contextual, and multiply enacted and experienced. Housework and care work are not fixed, mechanistic categories that remain unchanged across space, time, and cultures; individuals and couples from different cultures can experience and assign distinct practical and emotional meanings to particular tasks such as cooking, responding to children’s needs, and liaising with teachers to ensure children’s social and cultural adaptation and well-being. Thus, emotional and cognitive labour at home does not necessarily feel like a “burden.” (2) Dominant measurement tools for assessing gender equality in household divisions of labour can overlook the emotional, situational, and contextual complexities of new immigrant life and overestimate the importance of gender equality aims for families relative to the varied life challenges and changes they are facing. We advocate shifting from measuring gender equality as a 50-50 gender split or gender sameness as the optimal division of labour towards inquiring how new immigrant parents’ experiences of paid and unpaid work challenge and revise the scope and focus of this metric. (3) In contrast to the dominant measurement tools in most studies on gender divisions of domestic labour, we suggest alternative theorizations. Symmetry , for example, can strike a balance between differences and sameness, while social provisioning considers both unpaid and paid work as contextually different aspects of direct and indirect care. Overall, our paper highlights the unique lived realities of new immigrant families and the weaknesses of employing a one-size-fits-all approach and concepts derived from Euro-western contexts and epistemological traditions that emphasize singularity rather than plurality and multiplicity. We also emphasize the need to widen the field of gender divisions of labour so that it centers relationalities (of paid and unpaid work, relationalities within and between household care tasks and responsibilities), people’s individual and relational identities, care and justice, and complex cross-cultural transitions.
Non-presenting author: Andrea Doucet, Brock University
Andrea Sterling, Egale Canada
Developing and evaluating trauma-informed workshops for parents and caregivers of 2SLGBTQI youth
Parents and caregivers are instrumental in fostering positive experiences for 2SLGBTQI children. However, knowledge that promotes the wellbeing of 2SLGBTQI youth within the family is often obscured by misinformation, and it can be difficult for caregivers to navigate their child’s coming out with false information on hand. Furthermore, an increase in political attempts to undermine the human rights of queer, trans and nonbinary people via the introduction of transphobic or homophobic bills (e.g., Policy 713 in New Brunswick, pronoun policy in Saskatchewan), as well as the rise in hateful discourse in right-wing media (Corrêa et al., 2023), are major hinderances to accessing safe and appropriate information for caregivers and 2SLGBTQI youth. Furthermore, there is a general lack of access to reliable, centralized information for caregivers to access about 2SLGBTQI identities. Providing these resources will help to alleviate parental anxiety, which is a major obstacle for support. Community building and experience sharing are also crucial to decreasing anxiety levels in caregivers (Matsuno and Israel, 2021), which in turn has a positive effect on 2SLGBTQI youth’s experiences and their interactions. To contribute to improving 2SLGBTQI youth’s—as well as their caregivers’—experiences while navigating the world with marginalized identities, we undertook a project combining workshops for caregivers and intervention research with the idea of (1) providing truthful information about 2SLGBTQI identities to parents and caregivers of 2SLGBTQI youth, (2) building a network of parents and caregivers based on their common experiences of raising 2SLGBTQI children, and (3) assessing the impact of the provided workshops. The current presentation will focus on the latter, emphasizing the trauma-informed content of the workshops and the research tools for evaluating our anti-oppressive workshops. Our current project includes two main research activities: focus groups that will document experiences of caregiving for 2SLGBTQI youth, needs for support, and three surveys evaluating the acceptability, feasibility, appropriateness, and overall efficacy of the provided workshops. The surveys will be administered prior to the workshops, immediately after, and three months post-workshop, to assess the short and long-terms outcomes of the intervention. Documenting these experiences is crucial to knowing what information is needed by caregivers of 2SLGBTQI youth, keeping in mind the tenets of community-based research, and to determining what should be conveyed in future interventions. Furthermore, the research framework we are implementing via surveys will enable us to improve content and delivery in the future. Data collection will begin in the winter of 2024, and we anticipate that some challenges that caregivers will raise during our course and subsequent focus groups will include an inability to find trustworthy resources and filter through misinformation. We also expect relatively high levels of anxiety for their child’s safety and wellbeing in a homophobic/transphobic society, and concerns about disclosure in school or extended family settings. Furthermore, we are hypothesizing that our study groups will likely demonstrate relatively high acceptability ratings of the workshops, since the course we are offering will be advertised as supportive of 2SLGBTQI youth. Future iterations of the intervention will consider the appropriateness and efficacy ratings of the workshops, but formal predictions are difficult to formulate since our curriculum is being developed for the first time. By providing informational workshops based on community needs, we are challenging hateful discourse and aiming to sustain healthy family relationships between 2SLGBTQI youth and their caregivers. Ultimately, we aim to improve family relationships as it relates to acceptance of 2SLGBTQI children, decrease gender-based violence and rejection, and improve social supports for 2SLGBTQI youth and their caregivers. The evaluation of our intervention is intrinsically community-based, focusing on the needs and challenges of parents, furthering trauma-informed approaches to research and program development.
Non-presenting authors: Noah Rodomar, Egale Canada; Félix Desmeules-Trudel, Egale Canada