The ACTEW Blog

The EI Act was introduced in 1996, and it tightened access to insurance benefits by increasing the number of part-time hours and the number of weeks needed to qualify for EI. The tighter restrictions disproportionately disqualifies contingent workers and women are more likely to be contingent workers.

Ursule Critoph in her 2003 article, Who Wins, Who Loses: The Real Story of the Transfer of Training to the Provinces and Its Impact on Women, found that these new restrictions disproportionately excluded women. Five years after the new EI criteria, the percentage of women receiving EI dropped by 6%, whereas the percentage of men receiving EI benefits dropped only by 1%.

This trend has continued. In the 2005 EI Monitoring and Assessment Report, HRSDC reported a 8.3% access rate difference between the genders, with 89.6% of unemployed men and 82.3% of unemployed women eligible for EI. In the same report, HRSDC also stated that only 42.8% of unemployed part-timers were eligible for EI. Women account for about 7 in 10 of all Canadian part-time employees.

Women are also more likely to be "NEREs", that is New Entrants or Re-Entrants to the workforce. According to a 2000 HRSDC study, NEREs make up one-quarter of all workers with job separation and slightly more than half of all NEREs are women. And a large of portion of women who are NEREs were also single mothers. NEREs must acquire 910 hours of work before they are eligible for EI, and as such have great difficulty accessing training that would improve their employability. HRSDC's most recent EI monitoring report analyses NEREs' access to EI benefits by immigration and generational differences, but not by gender.

Labels: Issues_and_Trends, Resources_and_Research