Self-Employed Women: Policy Options That Promote Equality and Economic Opportunities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Women form a sizable and growing proportion of the self-employed in Canada. Certain factors associated with female self-employment contribute to the financial vulnerability many self-employed women experience. Compared to self-employed men, self-employed women are more concentrated in the service industry, are more likely to work part-time hours and from their homes, are more likely to work on their own account (with no or very few employees) and are less likely to have their businesses incorporated. Their lower incomes, coupled with fluctuations in business markets, can place them in a precarious financial situation. Lack of access to Employment Insurance (EI) benefits in the event of personal illness, childbirth or adoption, or acute family caregiving situations, the high cost of private insurance, and difficulties securing small loans present additional and serious obstacles that affect self-employed women, their families and their businesses. In light of these circumstances, one major aim of the current study was to identify potential policy options to promote equality and economic opportunities for self-employed women, particularly during periods when their businesses are interrupted by ill health or family caregiving. We used a Policy Delphi approach to solicit opinions from two samples of self-employed women (including both higher and lower income earners), as well as from representatives of various other stakeholder groups (e.g., government, banks, insurance companies and professional associations). We examined both public and private approaches (i.e., changes to the current EI system, a tax-sheltered savings plan and private insurance) and concluded that changes in public policy and in private savings, financing approaches, insurance, and other services are required to serve two complementary functions: fulfill social protection needs and support for the business needs of self-employed women. Specific recommendations are made that would enable self-employed individuals to have broader social protection by extending EI special benefits to them, and enhanced flexibility to protect their business earnings through both private sector mechanisms and tax incentives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".