Gender has always been 'shut out' from NDIS policy development
The much-anticipated NDIS review released in late 2023 failed to explicitly consider gender equality or recommend a gender strategy. In today’s post, UNSW PhD candidate Molly Saunders gives a history of gender and the NDIS, and discusses her doctoral research on whether the NDIS supports women with disability to live a life of their own choosing.
In December 2023, the Final Report of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Review was released.
As Pianteodosi and colleagues wrote in the Conversation last month, the report made key recommendations to improve the participation of First Nations, culturally and linguistically diverse, and LGBTIQ+ communities. Nevertheless, gender inequality remained a significant blind-spot within the report. This is concerning because although women and girls are more likely than men to have a disability, they comprise only 37% of NDIS participants.
Responding to this inequality, my doctoral research interviews women with disability about how the NDIS has shaped their freedoms to achieve their aspirations. To better understand their experiences, I examine how gender inequality was considered within design of the scheme, demonstrating that - as in the NDIS Review - gender was a significant blind-spot.
How was gender considered in the design of the NDIS?
The Shut Out Report
The NDIS arose out of two influential Australian government reports. The first report, Shut Out: The Experience of People with Disabilities and their Families in Australia (2009), was intended to inform the development of a National Disability Strategy. It was written after Australia’s ratification of the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the resulting report highlighted the systemic discrimination and human rights violations of people with disability in Australia.
Image by Ashley Webb on Flickr
Within the 90-page report, only one paragraph discussed disability and gender. The discussion was limited to the issue of domestic and family violence, and reflected an understanding that gender issues are synonymous with ‘women’s issues’. This conflation is concerning because it constructs essentialist ideas of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, whilst also framing general policy issues as gender neutral. This ignores how gendered issues shape all aspects of contemporary policies such as the NDIS. Thus, whilst the report acknowledged one important gendered issue, it did not consider how gender norms broadly shape Australian disability policy and thereby perpetuate inequality.
The Productivity Commission Report
The Australian government then published the National Disability Strategy 2010-2020 and launched an inquiry into a national disability support system in Australia. This inquiry resulted in the Productivity Commission’s report, Disability Care and Support (2011) which provided the blueprint for the NDIS.
Akin to the Shut Out Report, the Inquiry Report considered various ‘women’s issues’, yet overlooked how the underlying principles of the scheme may perpetuate dominant gender norms and gender inequality. For example, the Commission raised issues such as adequate and accessible child-care and highlighted the need to promote “the interests of particular groups such as …women with a disability” (p. 508). The report framed child-care as a women’s issue by connecting it to women’s participation in paid labour. Despite this, central components of the NDIS’s design were not subject to gender analysis. For example, the report did not consider how the access criteria or the concept of individualised funding may be shaped by dominant gender norms, such as masculinized understandings of disability. In this way, both reports failed to adequately consider gender within NDIS policy.
The ongoing marginalisation of women with disability within the NDIS
Over ten years later, the implications of this oversight are apparent, with women and girls with disability being significantly under-represented in the NDIS. Moreover, despite growing community advocacy about this inequality, there is little scholarly research engaging women with disability about their experiences of the NDIS, and the resulting policy implications (although see this project by Yates and colleagues). This suggests that there remains a significant need to assess gender inequality within the NDIS.
The NDIS is failing to support women with disability to live the lives they want to
Considering these issues, my doctoral research interviews women with disability across Australia to explore how the NDIS is shaping their freedom to live a life of their own choosing.
Early findings indicate that the NDIS ultimately failed to support these women to fully realise their aspirations. This is because the freedoms they accrued through the NDIS, such as greater freedom of movement, were only partial. Moreover, these positive impacts were unequal: many women experienced little to no changes in their available opportunities, whilst a minority of women accrued the majority of new freedoms.
The women’s accounts also indicated that the NDIS often restricted their freedoms in new ways. Many women spoke of the administrative violence that they experienced within the NDIS, for instance where they were disbelieved, mis-represented or ignored. Not only did this frequently cause immense distress, it denied the women social respect and protection from non-discrimination. For those with caring responsibilities, it also perpetuated fears that the government would remove their child from their care, leading some women to engage less with the NDIS. In these ways and more, the women demonstrated that the NDIS failed to fully support them to live the lives they wanted to live.
How does gender account for this failure?
The next stage of my research will analyse the interview data, to provide insight into the causes of this failure. Specifically, it will consider how hidden gender norms embedded within key legislative and operational aspects of the scheme shaped the interview participants’ experiences. This analysis will move beyond consideration of ‘women’s issues’ to explore how gendered assumptions within the NDIS underpin its foundational and exclusionary understanding of who needs care, and how masculinized understandings of autonomy and individualism shape women’s experience of policy aspects such as the ‘reasonable and necessary’ criteria.
In this way, my research will expand our understanding of how women with disability experience the NDIS, and how the scheme is entrenching gender inequality. These findings will be relevant for anyone seeking to design and implement care systems that are sensitive to the experiences of women with disability. In the meantime however, advocacy organisations’ calls for an NDIS gender strategy remain integral to supporting women with disability to have greater equality of access to disability support.
Moderated by @DrSophieYates