This International Women’s Day, we refuse to celebrate progress that isn’t real. We fight for housing justice. We fight for human rights. We fight for each other.
On March 8, we mark International Women’s Day under the global theme “Accelerate Action.” At the current rate of progress, it will take until 2158 to achieve full gender parity, according to the World Economic Forum.
If we’re going to talk about meaningful progress, we must address how and why women, Two-Spirit, trans, and gender-diverse people are being pushed further into housing precarity and homelessness.
Across the country, governments are failing to act, allowing rents to soar, impeding social housing, and even criminalizing people struggling with the realities of being unhoused.
Instead of building a future where everyone has a safe, affordable place to live, decision-makers are rolling back rights and making life harder for those already struggling.
The situation is dire—but we are not powerless.
The Urgency of Now
Despite Canada’s commitments to gender equality and human rights, women and gender-diverse people are being left behind. Here is some of what we know about the unique ways we know they experience housing precarity and homelessness:
- Survivors fleeing violence are turned away from full shelters.
- Indigenous women, who are 3.5 times more likely to experience violence than non-Indigenous women, face disproportionately high rates of housing insecurity.
- Women with disabilities face higher rates of intimate partner violence, often exacerbated by social isolation and financial dependence on abusive partners.
- Women and transgender people experiencing homelessness in Toronto are dying at shocking rates, and at tragically young ages. From January to June 2024 alone, 135 people experiencing homelessness lost their lives. The median age at death for unhoused women has dropped to just 36 years.
- 28% of women-led households in Canada are in core housing need.
- 21% of single mothers raise their children in poverty.
- Available research underestimates the scale of women’s homelessness in Canada. Because women are more likely to experience hidden homelessness, they are less likely to appear in shelters, drop ins, public spaces, or social services. This means that women are undercounted in data, research, and PiT Counts.
- In our Pan-Canadian Women’s Housing and Homelessness Survey, 26% of gender-diverse people reported having lost their housing due to discrimination and/or harassment and 43% reported experiencing discrimination from landlords and/or property managers on the basis of gender.
This isn’t an accident.
Decades of policy failures and government inaction have deepened this crisis. Social housing has fallen behind to meet the need. Housing costs have skyrocketed while wages and income supports stagnate. The safety net that was supposed to catch people is being torn apart.
Across Canada, criminalizing homelessness is a growing trend—clearing encampments, enacting bylaws that punish people without shelter, and basic human rights are under constant threat.
We Are Fighting Back – Make Your Voice Heard
Homelessness among women and gender-diverse people in Canada has been declared a national human rights crisis. This was because of the two Human Rights Claims the Women’s National Housing & Homelessness Network and National Indigenous Housing Network filed to the Federal Housing Advocate in 2022. Last year, the National Housing Council announced its review panel that will examine this crisis and create recommendations that the federal Housing Minister cannot ignore.
You can make history by contributing to Canada’s first-ever human rights-based review panel on Canada’s failure to eliminate homelessness for women and gender-diverse people.
The human rights review panel known as Neha is examining the right to safe, adequate and affordable housing for women, Two Spirit, trans, and gender-diverse people, and the government’s duty to uphold this right.
Neha is listening. The government will be forced to listen too.
How You Can Take Action
- Make a Submission to Neha: Your testimony will help push for real policy change. Learn how to submit here.
- The deadline to make a submission is April 11.
- Spread the Word: Share this message on social media and encourage others to take action by visiting genderhousingjustice.ca.
This International Women’s Day, we refuse to celebrate progress that isn’t real. We fight for housing justice. We fight for human rights. We fight for each other.
