Caring for carer employees: An ethical imperative
Resource Details
Author(s): Mallory Hendry
Date: December 10, 2024
Somewhere between her PhD research on how home and community care was delivered in medically underserved Northern Ontario to her first job at Brock evaluating home care programs for Niagara Public Health, Allison Williams realized she was looking at a social justice issue.
A primary family carer — typically a woman — was doing most of the adult caregiving in the vast majority of cases, often without any provincial or federal support and with increasingly limited community supports. Whether they dropped out of the workforce altogether — missing out on salary, benefits, pension, and opportunities for advancement, and facing the challenges of re-entry once their loved one passed away — or stuck it out at their job enduring burnout, fatigue, and performance issues, these women had to rebuild their lives all over again.
“It didn’t take me long to connect the dots and realize this wasn’t right,” says Williams, now a professor of geography at McMaster University.
“We’ve been working so hard for how many years to gain gender equality at work and it’s all taken away because women are expected to provide unpaid care to adult family members? Consequently, our country’s economic engine isn’t operating as effectively as it could, we aren’t upholding gender equality at work or in society more broadly. There were so many things wrong. So, I thought to myself, OK, how am I going to change this?”
A primary family carer — typically a woman — was doing most of the adult caregiving in the vast majority of cases, often without any provincial or federal support and with increasingly limited community supports. Whether they dropped out of the workforce altogether — missing out on salary, benefits, pension, and opportunities for advancement, and facing the challenges of re-entry once their loved one passed away — or stuck it out at their job enduring burnout, fatigue, and performance issues, these women had to rebuild their lives all over again.
“It didn’t take me long to connect the dots and realize this wasn’t right,” says Williams, now a professor of geography at McMaster University.
“We’ve been working so hard for how many years to gain gender equality at work and it’s all taken away because women are expected to provide unpaid care to adult family members? Consequently, our country’s economic engine isn’t operating as effectively as it could, we aren’t upholding gender equality at work or in society more broadly. There were so many things wrong. So, I thought to myself, OK, how am I going to change this?”