Two experiences in the last few days showed me that working women, especially those with families, have little choice but to contribute to climate change. 

A loans officer at a bank told me she and her spouse had to sell their house in a popular suburb of Halifax recently.  The average house price in Halifax-Dartmouth NS stands at $581,000, a 7.7% increase year over year.  The loans officer didn’t say why, but I inferred the house was too expensive, and taxes were higher than she’d like.  No matter, she and her husband bought another house in Hantsport, a town of 1500 in the rural municipality of West Hants in the Annapolis Valley. There the average home price is $341,399 .  Hantsport is 73.5 km from Halifax, or a 55- minute drive from the city.  Every morning, she and her husband drive into Halifax where both work; every evening he picks her up and they drive back home.  On a good day, the trip takes an hour – but in bad weather, or with traffic back-ups, the drive takes longer. Public transportation?  Nope.  Google tells me that to take the bus – basically a privately owned minibus from Hantsport – the fare ranges from $37 to $49 each way.  A taxi costs between $140 and $170 each way.  As it is, Google estimates the price in gasoline alone for the couple’s commute costs from $14-21 each way, or about $700 a month.  

Another woman I know works in the charitable sector in Halifax.  Though she is from the city, for the last 15 years she and her family have lived in Truro, a town 97.2 km from downtown Halifax. Compared to Halifax, house prices in Truro average $273,434 .  She drives back and forth four days a week, and works from home one day.  Google tells me it takes 1 hour 6 minutes on a good day to drive one way.  She drives both ways, in all weather.  She spends at least $23 on gas each way – which costs about $800 a month.   She could take the privately-owned Maritime Bus, but it doesn’t leave Truro daily till 12 noon, and the last bus from Halifax to Truro  is at 3.50 pm.  Bus fares are between $21 and $30 each way.  Private shuttles offer less service, at a higher price.  Her husband works in Truro, but since there are no public buses in the town of Truro, he has to have his own car to get to work.  In addition the woman and her spouse have two teenaged children.  They have jobs, when not going to school– one in retail, the other cuts grass. The woman says she can’t afford to give them an allowance, or to pay the $40 admission ticket for each of her teens to go to the funfair in town this week.   

Full-time jobs, but not enough money to live

Both these women are passionate about the environment.  They rinse then reuse plastic baggies; they wear gently-used clothes; they have no vacations planned.  Neither has an extra $43 a month to subscribe to the daily newspaper.   They don’t have the time or know-how to grow a garden so they are left – like most Nova Scotians – paying some of the highest supermarket prices for food in the country.  

These are middle-class women.  They have full-time jobs; they pay taxes.  Yet they must live from one two-week pay cheque to the next.  Despite having benefits such as employer-paid drug and dental plans, the women say they can’t keep up with the cost of living.

What’s more, they are ashamed because they contribute to the environmental problems we face today.  To go to work, to drop off kids at school, to go shopping or visiting they have to rely on cars.  Not just any car, but a late model car that they can depend on in all seasons. In addition to cars which cost money to buy and add to the family’s debts, there are repairs, tires, insurance and of course fuel.  But these two women have little choice, if they want to work and to eat.

The cost to the environment of all that driving is major.  Each litre of gas used by a car produces 2.3 kg of CO₂ a greenhouse gas. Every time someone starts their engine, they also pump out a whole slew of emissions called criteria air contaminants (CACs) that add to air pollution and smog.  It’s estimated that if every driver in Canada could avoid idling their engine for three minutes a day, every day, it would reduce GHG (greenhouse gases) by 1.4 million tonnes a year. That’s the equivalent of taking 320,000 cars off the road for a year. 

The loans officer and the woman who works for a charity pay mortgages, that may be up for renewal.  The cost of a mortgage has risen from as low as 2.89% in December 2019, to 5.24% in December 2022. Predictions are that mortgage rates will rise another couple of percentage points by fall. 

Wages are also an issue especially for women.  Both the women are middle managers, their pay has not significantly risen in years.  It would take more than a 9% increase for them to just keep up with the cost of living – from 2022 to 2023 — and that isn’t going to happen. To maintain the women’s purchasing power they’d need a raise of at least 9% otherwise they will have a huge reduction in buying power.  We all know they are not going to receive a 9% raise this year.

Women: Victims of structural inequities

All of these are structural issues, but women are key victims- especially women who work in  nonunion workplaces.  In NS, only 25% of workers belong to a union.    We know the NS minimum wage is rock bottom — $14.50 an hour. However the Living Wage covers the actual cost to live, pay rent and utilities, pay for childcare, eat, pay for transport and more.  In 2022 the Living Wage in Halifax was $23.50  an hour— nearly 40% more than minimum wage pays. 

Statistics Canada reports that women who work in financial services (like the loans officer) should be earning about $36 an hour, and the charity employee about $33 an hour.   But wages are low in NS, among the lowest in Canada.  Fifty percent of workers in NS earn less than the Living Wage.  Both women earn $25-$30 an hour – which works out to just over $50,000 per year. 

Their workdays plus their two to three hour commutes every day means they have very little time to “buy local” or shop for products that are more environmentally friendly than the ones on shelves in big-box grocery.

Which brings us back to why I’m writing about women in the middle class.  Well, according to a 2021 study by the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society, more women than men in G20 countries claim to have changed their habits to fight climate change. Women are also more easily motivated than men to reduce their CO₂  emissions. There seems to be only one argument that motivates men more: being taxed at their level of emissions. The recent groundswell against the federal carbon tax has shown us that! In fact the NS government has launched a $56,000 advertising campaign against the carbon tax.

The findings from the Women’s Forum survey of 9,500 people in 19 G20 countries who participated in the study reveal that “women have changed their behaviour to decrease their carbon dioxide emissions by recycling, buying local, and reducing water and meat consumption. On the whole in Canada, women are more likely than men to cut down or cut out  meat and more likely to replace it with other proteins.”

According to the Women’s Forum study, 

“Women are also more easily motivated than men to decrease their CO2 emissions… because it will improve the planet and because of the knock-on benefits for future generations.”

Women’s Forum 2021 Barometer, p. 37

The two women I profile are no different.  But their circumstances put them in a situation where they are foe not friend to the environment.  They have no choice but to pump thousands of kilograms of CO₂ into the atmosphere just to get to work. Their workdays plus their two to three hour commutes every day means they have very little time to “buy local” or shop for products that are more environmentally friendly than the ones on shelves in big-box grocery.  Their incomes do not allow them the choice, nor the luxury, to do the things that count to save the planet.

Featured image above: credit Unite For Change