Women's economic empowerment in Canada through an intersectional lens

Karen D. Hughes, Amy Kaler and Alla Konnikov

Chapter 5 in Women’s Economic Empowerment and the State, 2026, pp 100-123 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter examines women's economic empowerment (WEE) in the context of Canada, a high-income country with a liberal welfare regime. Using an intersectional lens, we consider women's engagement in paid employment while also considering the constraints of women's unpaid work in the household. Canada illustrates many of Rubery's (2015) arguments about the contradictory effects of globalization, marketization, migration, and state policy on women's economic lives. Despite growing engagement in paid employment, women's access to the labour market has not produced a fair distribution of rewards, as some models of WEE predict. Instead, flexible work models limit access to good jobs, while gender gaps in unpaid household work stubbornly persist. Immigrant and racial/ethnic women also face intensified risks of insecurity and pay gaps. The state can play a role in reducing gender-based and intersectional inequalities, through enabling conditions of affordable childcare, parental leave, and labour market regulation.

Keywords: Women's Economic Empowerment; Paid Employment; Unpaid Work; Care; Gender; Intersectionality; Immigration; Racialization; Visible Minorities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781803921167
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803921174.00013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21465_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().