We would like to thank members of both committees here today for inviting us to speak with them regarding the financial barriers disabled women experience and how these can be removed. To tackle the poverty and social exclusion shadowing disabled women's lives, we first need to understand the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination they face and create targeted measures to dismantle these barriers. While we will use the word "women" throughout our statement this is only because the little data available for disabled women does not exist for other gender minorities. We have no reason to believe they encounter fewer barriers than disabled women do. In fact, inequalities highlighted here are exacerbated for disabled people belonging to other marginalised communities such as the ethnic minority or LGBTQ communities and those in institutional settings such as direct provision or the penal system.
Disabled women in Ireland experience deprivation and social exclusion at an even greater rate than disabled men. They are 25% more likely to live in poverty and only one quarter of disabled women are in paid employment of any kind. Up to one third of all women experiencing homelessness in Ireland are disabled and the list goes on.
Gendered inequalities impact almost every aspect of life. Creating a country truly committed to realising the UNCRPD requires an ambitious reimagining of State support, moving away from an adversarial, medicalised system to a rights-based approach providing equal opportunity to both pursue a full and meaningful life. To this end, we wish to reiterate how crucial it is that all demographic data collected by the State is fully disaggregated and to briefly highlight just three of the many ways in which the current one-size-fits-all system fails to account for the interactions between gender, disability and poverty.
Means testing imposes unnecessary restrictions on employment, contributing to Ireland having the highest unemployment rate for disabled people. The National Strategy for Women and Girls 2017-2020 notes disabled women's greater marginalisation and states this should be addressed through the National Disability Inclusion Strategy 2017-2021, NDIS. The NDIS action plan, however, contains only one mention of women, and the Comprehensive Employment Strategy for People with Disabilities does not mention women at all.
While gender receives some attention in implementation, tackling gender inequality needs to be prioritised at the highest strategic level to ensure a whole-of-government approach. Some 67% of disabled women are parents and 45% of family carers in Ireland are disabled. Due, in part, to these extra responsibilities, disabled women are more likely to work in the more flexible industries such as the arts sector or in part-time work in the caring professions. Many live in fear that unexpected circumstances may put them over the means test thresholds and in danger of losing all support while others are too afraid to pursue employment at all. Given that disabled women outnumber disabled men and are almost one sixth less likely to be in paid work, we would expect to find more women than men relying on supports such as the disability allowance. Disabled women, however, are actually less likely to receive disability allowance in Ireland.
Treating disability payments as a kind of jobseeker's allowance for disabled people fails to tackle the root causes of systemic poverty. We need a new approach. Disability supports can be a powerful tool to reduce inequality but only when recognised as a means to offset the significant cost of disability and to break cycles of poverty and exclusion instead of as a replacement for income. A diagnosis-driven assessment disadvantages women, who encounter more healthcare barriers. Ireland’s disability gender ratio is well below the EU average, indicating many women struggle to secure a diagnosis. Our members reported frequent dismissal, disbelief, misdiagnosis and widespread lack of knowledge regarding gender differences in many conditions as well as significant financial barriers to diagnosis.
Gender bias exists in medical practice and at State level. More autistic women than men remain undiagnosed into adulthood, but Ireland has no public pathways for adult diagnosis. Fibromyalgia, which is nine times more common in women, lacks official recognition in Ireland more than ten years after an EU declaration to address this. For women, receiving diagnosis for some conditions such as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, EDS, takes an average of 12 extra years, resulting in a significant extra cost to travel abroad as it cannot be diagnosed in Ireland. Too many fall through the cracks of our current assessment system, as shown by the nearly two thirds of disability allowance applications that were denied and overturned on appeal. A universal needs-led payment would go a long way to counterbalancing these inequalities while also relieving the State of significant administrative costs through streamlining the assessment process.
As well as undermining disabled women’s financial security, means testing can also force them into positions of dependency. Lack of financial independence is one of the most significant risk factors in experiencing gender-based violence, and financial dependency is also the most common barrier to escaping an abusive relationship. Violence increases a survivor’s risk of poverty and undermines their long-term health. Disabled women in Ireland are three times as likely to be subjected to domestic violence than non-disabled women and up to five times more likely to experience all types of gender-based violence.
Making disability-related supports provisional on the income of other people places disabled people in a very dependent position and at a much higher risk of violence and abuse. Lack of portability of disability supports and State reliance on family members as de facto caregivers compounds this dependency. Without access to personal assistance, disabled women needing support have little control over who comes into their home.
Disabled Women Ireland, DWI, has also heard many accounts of women threatened with or experiencing having their children taken from them should they leave their abuser. This fear is real and common. An Australian study found that most disabled women who reported domestic violence had their children removed from their care by the state.
This year Ireland, once again,has begun having a national conversation about gender-based violence and the toll it takes on our lives. Once again, the voices of disabled women are missing. More than 80% of us are subjected to gender-based violence in our lifetimes. We can no longer wait for the conversation to come around to us. We need to talk about why, as a country, we have silently abandoned some of our siblings to live in poverty and the shadow of violence. Too many assume the scale of abuse disabled women endure is because we are inherently more vulnerable and that disability somehow births this violence. Too few recognise that vulnerability is created by a society pushing people to its margins. Vulnerability is not an individual characteristic; it is measured in the spaces between power, security and marginalisation. We must shine a light on all of the ways in which, as disabled people, our control over our lives, independence and even our bodies has been undermined by the systems we have inherited and make the radical changes needed to break these cycles of disempowerment.
No disabled person should be made to feel their independence is so fragile, so conditional and so easily taken away that they need to live in fear, whether of the State, of the service provider, or of someone in their own home. I thank the committee for its time.