Siobhán is working with Carers NI on a joint report on Women, Unpaid Care and Employment.  Initial conversations with Carers NI have taken place to discuss how the research might be carried out with the hope of publishing the report early in 2024.

We are currently to try and organise a series of focus group sessions with women who have unpaid caring roles to discuss a range of issues around unpaid care and employment as follows:

• Women’s experiences of juggling work and unpaid care and the impacts on their health, wellbeing, career opportunities, etc.
• Analysis of the key challenges women carers face that prevent them from being able to enter or stay in work.
• Analysis of the impact of being unable to work on women’s health and finances.
• Reasons for giving up work or reducing hours, eg, lack of replacement care, changing care needs of loved ones, stress of juggling work and care, lack of support from employers, etc.
• Looking at the impact of the reduction in income as a result of giving up work or reducing hours to care.

Please contact Siobhán at policy@wsn.org.uk if you think that you could get a group of women together to discuss these issues sometime in October.  It would be good to have a mix of carers who are currently in some kind of employment as well as some who are not who could talk about the barriers they face and what could help them get into employment if they wanted to.