The ACTEW Blog

In partnership with the Rural Women Making Change Research Alliance based at Guelph University, ACTEW has just released a new fact sheet on employment issues for women living in rural communities.


For all the beauty and tranquility of the countryside, there's a price to pay:

• Rural communities have much higher unemployment rates than urban areas. While nationally women have lower unemployment rates than men, rural women in Ontario are the exception.
  
  
• Transportation is a primary concern. Seventy-three percent of rural women work in a municipality other than the one in which they live, compared to 31% of urban women.
  
  
• Rural women earn less than those in urban centres, a pattern that is also true for men. The average income for a Northern Ontario worker is 16.3% lower than the provincial average.
  
  
• While rural women are more likely than their urban peers to be self-employed, only 20% earn an income of $20,000 or more, compared to 31% of self-employed urban women.
  
  
• Employment agencies serving rural communities report a lack of jobs paying above minimum wage and few training opportunities for clients, and are far less likely than their urban counter-parts to provide women-specific services or program supports like child care.
  
  
• Depopulation is a tremendous threat for some communities; in 2001, Elliot Lake in northern Ontario reported a 43% out-migration of young people.

In the coming entries we'll look at some of the specific issues for women trying to work and live in the lower population areas of our province. We'd like to thank Belinda Leach and Soibhan O'Leary at Rural Women Making Change, Maggie McDonald of WERC, Woodstock, and the staff of Women Today of Huron for their research and insight around this issue.

For more facts on rural women's employment, visit our fact sheet at:
http://www.actew.org/projects/pwpsite/snapshots/rural.html

For more on initiatives and research related to issues for rural women, visit Rural Women Making Change at http://www.rwmc.uoguelph.ca.

Labels: ACTEW_Activities, Issues_and_Trends, Resources_and_Research