Making the long census form voluntary and removing questions on unpaid work is a double whammy against Canadian women.
Not only will the data collected be skewed, but there won’t be any information on the millions of hours of domestic, voluntary and care giving work, much of it done by women, as Chris Lind points out ( “Unpaid work ignored once more as census rules change”, WP, Aug. 19).
I was the women’s president of the National Farmers Union in the early 1990s when Carol Lees organized the Canadian Alliance of Home Managers in order to get unpaid work counted on the long census.
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We farm women had already spearheaded a successful drive to have the agriculture census changed so that the women on family farms could move out of the “no occupation” category that was our only option unless we held off-farm jobs in addition to our farming and household work.
The 1991 Census on Agriculture finally included the change we were lobbying for: instead of only one “farm operator” blank (almost always filled in with the name of the male farmer,) it included the possibility of listing several farm operators on the form so that women farmers could also be counted.
When that census data indicated a sharp increase in the number of women farming, I fielded numerous media calls on my reaction to this news.
I had to admit to a lack of surprise about this “new development.”
I knew from my own experience and anecdotally that women had been working hard on family farms for many generations. Nothing much had changed on that front.
But finally being counted meant that this role was recognized and could begin to be appropriately valued. To be uncounted is to be discounted.
Nettie Wiebe,
Delisle, Sask.
