In Winnipeg, and elsewhere, women face poverty more often than men do.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has found that close to 19 per cent of Canadian adult women are low-income, and that 56 per cent of families with children headed by sole-support mothers live in poverty.

According to the United Nations Platform for Action Committee, 70 per cent of those living in absolute poverty worldwide are women.

Women’s poverty has multiple causes. On average, women still earn just 72 cents for every dollar a man earns.

In addition, women do more unpaid labour than men do. In Canada, women do an estimated two thirds of unpaid caregiving work.

Because of rising education costs, it is difficult for all low-income people to access education; because women often bear the burden of childcare, they have an additional barrier to accessing education. Women are essentially punished for being mothers.

Racism and sexism are factors as well.

Immigrant and refugee women who have been educated elsewhere may lose their qualifications and face an expensive, time-consuming process to regain them.

Women often do “pink collar” work, such as childcare and secretarial work, that is ascribed a lower value than typically masculine work like construction. This pay disparity is the direct result of a sexist ideology that values masculinity over femininity, and thus “men’s work” over “women’s work.”

There are a number of places we can look for solutions.

One is government; we can push for policy change that addresses feminized poverty and works to change it from the roots up.

Another solution is something that is already occurring in Winnipeg: community organizations that can step in to fill the gaps left by government.

Many of these organizations were founded and are maintained by women. They provide services that range from child-minding, to financial service education, to healing programs centred on aboriginal teachings.

In this way, organizations such as the West Central Women’s Resource Centre (WCWRC), in Winnipeg’s West End, take a grassroots approach and work within an empowerment-based framework to help community members cope with poverty.

They simultaneously work to decolonize the inner city by creating safer spaces for Indigenous women and their families by interpreting the issues communities face and developing responses to these issues through an aboriginal lens.

The work that neighbourhood organizations do is an important kind of activism. With limited resources, women’s centres and neighbourhood renewal corporations subvert the Canadian colonial context and work to limit the negative effects of poverty in women’s lives.

To complement the work these organizations do, women’s poverty must be kept in the mainstream consciousness.

We need to continue to lobby for policy change that positively affects women’s lives, while also supporting community organizations and families that work on a grassroots level to decrease poverty.

This May, Winnipeg’s FemRev Collective will host the 2nd RebELLEs Pan-Canadian Young Feminist Gathering, where we will engage with issues of poverty, its roots in capitalism and ongoing colonialism in Canada.

Rather than waiting on the government to decide to change our lives, we can continue to work to change them from the bottom up.

Erin Vosters is a former University of Winnipeg student and FemRev Collective member.

This is part of the Poverty in Winnipeg feature. Its companion pieces are “The age of poverty on Selkirk Avenue” by Lauren Parsons (http://uniter.ca/view/6246/) and “Food bank usage shows scope of poverty in the city” by Nick Ternette (http://uniter.ca/view/6248/) .

Published in Volume 65, Number 25 of The Uniter (March 31, 2011)