Dr. Amy Hassett:

To be really concrete, I will break it down into two main areas where women experience significant barriers to accessing employment. There are still barriers to employment for women more generally as well as certain attitudes and perceptions around women in the workplace. For example, there are ideas that a woman's income is not likely to be the primary income in a family or that it is supplementary to a different earner. There is a pay gap that exists between men and women that also exists between disabled women and either women or disabled men.

I would say that overall in the workplace disabled women are subject to a kind of double disadvantage. They are women and they are disabled people. The problem is that there are perceptions and attitudes, and the problems with that, that exist for both kind of cohorts of people and these come together and create even bigger issues for disabled women.

The second set of issues I would identify is around the issue of flexibility in working. For example, there are certain conditions associated with chronic pain and chronic illness that women are more likely to have relative to men. Women are also more likely to have caregiving responsibilities and more likely to be responsible for maintaining a household, Unfortunately, that is still the case today. When we couple disability with those sorts of gendered expectations, the inflexibility of workplaces and the inflexibility of working hours and systems of working are creating massive barriers for disabled women. This double disadvantage of being a woman and being disabled comes together to create this situation where disabled women are earning less, are less likely to be employed and are over-represented in precarious part-time or temporary working arrangements.