Data Comparison: 1982 and 2002

For the purposes of the 2002 research, work was defined as any activity that resulted in the production of goods and services. It encompassed farm work, non-farm work,

household work and volunteer work.¹ This definition paralleled the definition used in the 1982 study. The basic criterion for inclusion was that each of these types of work, when done outside the household or by a non-family member, could be waged employment.

The work that is reported in this chapter was measured in three ways. First, respondents were asked about the types of work on the farm that were predominantly done by them.

Second, information was gathered in a series of tables, completed by the respondents during four interviews through a 15 month period. The work tables in the 2002 study included all the work categories from the 1982 study but added more detailed types of livestock work, farm management work and farm household work based on a series of focus groups held in 7 locations across Canada and other similar research (Rosenfeld 1985; Carbert 1995). In the work tables, respondents were asked to indicate those types of work that they had done during the past three months: as part of their regular duties;

only in exceptional circumstances; not done during that period of time; or not done on

1 Non-farm work includes off-farm work as well as work that takes place at the farm location but is not directly linked to the farm operation. The term non-farm work was used in place of off-farm work in this research to ensure that work activities taking place on the farm, that were not part of the farm operation were counted.

that farm operation. The responses for the work tables of the four interview periods were gathered into one data set for analysis. For the purposes of comparison with the 1982 study, I calculated the percentage of women who said they did a particular task regularly, in some cases averaging the percentages in categories that had been broken down in the 2002 survey. Third, the results of time diaries, which collected information on

respondents’ activities in fifteen minute intervals for four consecutive days following each interview, are also presented. These time diaries were completed four times over the course of the research project, once in each season. Chi-square analysis was used to determine the statistical significance of differences between groups in the data collected in 2002. All results reported as significant are statistically significant at the p < .05 level.

The sampling strategy in the 1982 study focused on women members of the NFU and the distribution of the surveys was based on the NFU Regions. This meant that there were no respondents in the 1982 study from Québec or Newfoundland. Table 4.1 shows that the 1982 study focused more heavily on Saskatchewan and Manitoba than the 2002 study. In 2002, respondents were selected from all the agricultural regions of Canada, resulting in a more accurate reflection of the Canadian family farm population.

Table 4.1 Location of Respondents 1982 and 2002

Provinces 2002 # % NFU Regions 1982 # %

Newfoundland 4 2 Newfoundland 0 0

Prince Edward Island 5 3

Nova Scotia 6 4

New Brunswick 8 5

Maritime Provinces (not Newfoundland)

19 9

Québec 13 8 Québec 0 0

Ontario 42 24 Central and Northeast Ontario 28 14

Manitoba 17 9 Manitoba 37 18

Saskatchewan 33 19 Saskatchewan 71 35

Alberta 33 19 Southern Alberta 33 16

British Columbia 11 6 British Columbia and NW Alberta 14 6

Total 172 100 Total 202 100

The respondents in the 1982 study were younger (40.7 years in 1982 vs 43.7 years in 2002) than the respondents in the 2002 study. In both studies, the sample population was younger than the average Canadian farm operator as measured by the Census of

Agriculture (Statistics Canada, 2001). The average household size in both research projects was very similar, 4.12 persons in 1982 and 4.23 persons in 2001-2002. The average number of children in the household in the 1982 study was 2 and in 2001-2002 the average number was 2.1. Age and family size differences in the data are small and should not affect the analysis. The biggest difference is in the location of the

respondents. In the 1982 sample, 69 percent of respondents came from the Prairie Provinces compared with 47 percent in 2002. This difference does influence the type of farming reflected in the data, with a smaller proportion of grain, livestock and mixed farming operations and a larger proportion of dairy, fruit and vegetable and small livestock operations in 2002. The impact may be to make certain types of work such as milking, application of chemicals and harvesting without machinery more common than would be the case if the samples were identically distributed in both surveys.

The conclusion in the 1982 study that farming by inheritance was still a male expectation and young women growing up on the farm were encouraged to ‘get an education’

remains pertinent today. In both the 1982 and 2002 studies, farm women were more highly educated than farm men, although the gap is slightly smaller in 2002. In 1982, 45 percent of the women respondents and 32 percent of their spouses (men) had education beyond secondary school. In 2001-2002, 69 percent of the women and 59 percent of the men in the study had education beyond secondary school. In 1982, 22 percent of women described their formal education background as technical/vocational and 23 percent described it as university. In 2001-2002, education levels have increased with 29 percent of women having completed technical/vocational school, 9 percent with some university and 30 percent with a university degree. Considerably fewer of the women in the 2002 study were raised on a farm (56% in 2002 vs 71% in 1982), a reflection of the declining rural farm population in Canada. Unlike farm men, who tend to be raised on farms, women typically enter farming through marriage and, as a result, are more likely to come from a variety of backgrounds. Changes in the characteristics of farm women signal a

potential for changing attitudes about gender roles and relations on the farm as these have been linked to higher levels of education and women moving into rural communities bringing non-traditional attitudes with them (Symes 1991; Little 2002a).