Leaders in the disability sector say the process surrounding the National Disability Insurance Service (NDIS) review, released last week, “bled dry” experts in the women’s sector, who have long advocated for the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) to develop a gender equality strategy. They’ve now been left feeling “betrayed” and “devastated” by a review they say fails women with disabilities.
Care services in industrialised nations like Australia have long been moving towards an “individualised funding model”, which aims to increase individual service users’ flexibility, choice and control over services and supports. However, research suggests such schemes have the potential to exacerbate inequalities.
In the case of women with disabilities, that’s precisely what’s happened. According to research published in the International Journal for Equality and Health, the NDIS has a female participation rate of only 37% — despite women and girls making up half of the disability population — and that rate has barely changed since the scheme’s inception.
Why is that? The research, led by Sophie Yates, a research fellow at the Australia National University Crawford School of Public Policy, found that disabled women face several barriers when applying for and receiving support through the NDIS, including their level of confidence; negotiation and self-advocacy skills in a system that relies on those skills; gendered discrimination in diagnosis and the medical system; and support for and recognition of their caring roles.
“These results suggest that women are not receiving equitable treatment with regard to the NDIS,” the study states.
As a result, advocates in the women’s sector, including Women with Disabilities Australia (WWDA), have advocated for the NDIA to develop a gender equality strategy.
WWDA CEO Carolyn Frohmader tells Crikey she was given personal assurances during the NDIS review’s extensive consultation process — to which the WWDA significantly contributed, including by hosting a “Sex and the NDIS” forum that, according to Frohmader, was so over-subscribed they had to turn people away — that the review would include a recommendation to develop the strategy.
So, imagine Frohmader’s surprise when the final NDIS review report did not include the recommendation for a gender equality strategy. Even worse, the review seems to have ignored women. The final 338-page report mentions the word “gender” just three times and “women” five times — and just two of those mentions of “women” were not about the specific needs of First Nations women or gender and sexual diverse people.
The NDIS review comes on the heels of the disability royal commission’s final report, which was likewise criticised for failing to acknowledge or address the specific needs of women with disabilities in its recommendations. It also comes ahead of an expected national gender equality strategy from the Albanese government due early next year.
The Albanese government has promised that with the publication of a national strategy, it will embed gender and gender equality in everything it does — something called “gender mainstreaming” — and that this will be backed up with the equally anoraky-sounding but vitally important concept of “gender-responsive budgeting”. According to UN Women, that’s when the priorities and needs of all people, including women, are understood and included at every stage of budget design and planning processes, including analysing gender gaps and using the findings to shape and monitor budgets.
“It’s a joke,” Frohmader tells Crikey. “They bled us dry, and yet it’s all siloed”, referencing the considerable contribution WWDA and others in the women’s sector made to the review’s consultation process in the hopes of elevating the needs of women with disabilities.
“My broader, systemic question is: what is the point of having a national strategy for gender equality, a national strategy to eliminate violence against women, and then this review comes out and there’s nothing.”
“They promised me … and I think that this is so heartbreaking, this betrayal,” says Frohmader.
“It’s, frankly, quite contradictory,” says Yates, lead author of the study looking at women’s experiences of the NDIS, though she emphasises that the review more broadly has a lot of positive things in it.
“They’re saying they will have a gender mainstreaming approach, but then it is absent from this review.”
Jen Hargrave, an advocate for women with disabilities and researcher at the University of Melbourne who co-authored the study looking at women’s experiences of the NDIS, says, “It’s been devastating to see both the NDIS review and the royal commission ignore women in their recommendations.”
“These processes are so extractive, they take so much from us,” she adds. “I don’t have much hope that either of those reports will help women with disabilities this year, next year, or the year after.”
In response to the criticism, a representative for the NDIS review panel told Crikey, “We understand the barriers faced by women with disability and we call out ‘intersectionality’ specifically.”
“We strongly support a gender lens being put over all the review’s work,” they added. “We consider if our recommendations are implemented, gender equity considerations must be at the forefront to make sure implementation succeeds.”
That’s quite grim.
i mean the state of affairs described, not the article itself
Very grim. Look at America which the daft neo libs clubbers have set up .With the big 6 lobby classes on eye watering kickbacks feeding their coffers in the Cayman Islands; incidentally the local Cayman Islanders aint got clean pipes or plush libraries for their people.. Just saying that is the end result of neo liberal policy no matter what human be it a bloke or a chick. The fact the blokes and the richest control the increasingly cartel led so called democracy does not give you pause for concern should be the thinking man’s motivation in this space.
DVA (Department of Veterans Affairs) Does not provide gender equal medical support for ex-female veterans. Medical support is geared towards male service personnel. Male veterans get disability support tailored to their requirements. Recognition of service-caused disability is geared towards male-accepted injury. There are some veterans using the NDIS service to access treatment not accepted by DVA as service caused. This solution is easier than taking up the fight to prove the service link. Maybe the whole disability medical system needs to review how they accept, provide for and assess the needs of females.
That’s disappointing but sadly unsurprising. I knew someone who used to joke that the Aus Defence Association should actually be called Aus Men’s Defence Association
Yep just like the closed shop free to air broadcasting on offer; mostly sport and dross based on violence. Where’s the money for ARTs and humanities.. traditionally female gendered too
Spot on; one cannot help a problem if the problem is not even considered or seen. Same in the women assumed as sole payers of the childcare; when the middle men business popped up around the time of Howard they jumped from the USA into Australia; the profiteering middle men who make money; huge profits read the APM profits and even ex PM’s Mrs who flogged her middle man agency for disabled people for billions! Yep there is $$$ in them there hills fellas and the few entrepreneurial females on the gravy train; it is a joke a colossal scam in my humble opinion ; the loss of jobs for women over 45 means we are the victims along with any other buggers out there who are unlucky enough to be put under the eye of the various middle men profiteering scum Beadles like you got in the Dickens novels about poor houses and the ugly profiteering parasite classs. Call em middle men and lobby boys mostly in the big 6 towers etc .. An ugly futile , gaslighting and profiteering drag on the collective local economy and our dignity and making us all poorer and stealing our sovereign jobs and agency.
Agency and equity; women did well our generation still do the gratis childcare -unlike in other Western so called representative, economic democracies who believe in equity; i.e sharing the burden with the Nuclear family caregivers(they actually share in the communal; for their collective children and the next generation of tax payers) Wow what a concept gents! The ratbags who issue on high statements like the above are not worth an argument as they seem to blithely ignore this fact.Yep .The same cowboys and ratbaggery of elite professional women who can’t seem to analyse an issue without the blinkered neo liberal cloudy economic lens- It is me who did the free childcare and I have produced 2 graduates on a pittance. With a multitude of post professional courses and then some; paying these middlemen enterpreneur cowboys who gouge our community chests; all sitting in the forums at NDIA, NDIS, sitting in so called Charity sectors; once great institutions; doing notional symbolic diversity flag waving and nothing but stealing profits and our collective agency.The middle men are the culprits.The male trolling does not help nor does it actually addresss the biggest scams in the lobby classes. Costing All Australians.These middle men parasites classes are living off the NDIS and the job agencies are often the same businesses
Well agree about the proliferation of middle men and the general utopia-isation of Australia and monetisation of areas such as charities. Not sure it is really a gender issue, except perhaps more men are willing to do crap but well paid jobs, partly because this is the basis they get judged on. In fact, men ran the country more 30 years ago when this did not happen! Again, clearly women do more of the caring roles. The gender wage gap exists even in Sweden despite a raft of policies designed to eliminate it, including good things like paid paternal leave which cant be transferred to the female.
It would be good to have some balanced contribution to this topic, and not just from the usual self selecting feminist academics who studied a whole 30 women and reported their probably not entirely unbiased views.
It does not sound good that only 35% of NDIS participants are female, but five minutes googling throws up some NDIS analysis that attributes it to the huge increase in participation by young people with disabilities like autism that are much more common among males. This may not be a good thing of course, but in part reflects the huge increase in funding and participation in the NDIS and is more nuanced than people being “bled dry” in a scheme on course to cost $100 billion a year.
https://data.ndis.gov.au/media/2121/download?attachment:
“In summary, the high male to female ratio across NDIS participants is due to the relatively high proportion of children entering the Scheme. The most common disability types at younger ages are autism and developmental delay, which are far more prevalent in males than females”
They are far more diagnosed in males, they specifically mentioned gendered diagnosis. But yes, it would be good if the NDIS review had bothered to consider more than 30 women
Wrong.wrong wrong. And ignoring the fact women are used as fodder for free; seen the ads telling women in our later careers to just “volunteer” or “do aged care”..Seen the top 100 Rich list mate; See the order of things in our so-called equal democracy. Seen the University sector based on profits first; that the Neo libs have organised and neo lib labour have failed to stem enough but not doing jack
Its lucky then that women are on average happier with their lives than men, and that the proportion of men that make the Top 100 richest is only about one thousandth of 1 per cent. Agree with you re Universities, though it seems a different topic. And clearly women do more caring roles, largely responsible for the gender wage gap as men do more paid hours and women more unpaid hours and caring roles get exploited.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-women-happier-than-men-do-gender-rights-make-a-difference/#:~:text=Women%20around%20the%20world%20report,East%20and%20sub%2DSaharan%20Africa.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2003/10/29/global-gender-gaps/
From reading the report, it seems that about half the NDIS cohort are children, and further it seems that 70% of those children are male. If, as the recommendations suggest, most children are removed from the NDIS and receive support through the education system instead, this should go a long way towards balancing things up.