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Catching Up with the Clock

  • Writer: Girl Up Edmonton
    Girl Up Edmonton
  • Jun 3, 2024
  • 9 min read

On Disabled Women and Temporal In/Accessibilities in the Workplace


Written by Tila Tran

In combining two of my classes together, The Politics of Disability and Gender and Politics, I wrote a research policy brief concerning how women with disabilities encounter barriers to the workplace due to temporal exclusions.


Throughout my political science degree, I have never heard of Critical Disability Studies until January, 2024. I learned a tremendous amount of information regarding disability: the Biopolitics of Disability, Disability and the "Environment", the Re-worlding of Disability, Interspecies, Queering and Cripping Disability Studies, Crip Temporalities. Following these topics, we dived into Disability and Christian Practice, Theology and Conceptions of the Divine, Apocalypse and Eschatologies. All of this goes with saying that this class was possibly the most intellectual class I've taken thus far in my undergraduate degree.


Of the topics discussed, the most prominent topic for me was Crip Temporalities; how the social construct of time is different for disabled bodies, and within that, how time is capitalized and commodified into a particular structure that prides on and values independency, productivity, efficiency. And of course, the able-bodied.


Another crucial topic discussed in this class was the inaccessibility of academia. In learning Critical Disability Studies, it has come to attention the idea that Critical Disability Studies remains largely an academic field. That said, it is crucial to make academia more accessible, and in doing so, make society a more accepting place for disability.


So, I'll share what I learned and researched.


The foreground of my policy brief posits that women with disabilities encounter barriers to the workplace due to temporal exclusions. The normalization of clock-time, commodified by capitalistic ideals of “productivity, self-sufficiency, independence, and achievement” (Kafer, 2021) prevents women with disabilities from participating in the workplace. The way normative society operates does not lend attention to individuals who are unable to be as productive, self-sufficient, or as in tune with the clock as well as their able-bodied counterparts. The domain of work, and the collective ticking of the clock is linear and does not account for the lives of disabled women who exist outside the linearity of clock time; time for disabled bodies is bent. As women with disabilities are unable to access the clock, the result is lesser pay and financial instability resulting from a gender pay gap and lack of work opportunities.

What is Clock-Time?

Clock-time, deriving from capitalism, is “the process of diffusion of house clocks and watches, the cultural meanings ascribed to punctuality, time-saving, time-efficiency…not as a mere tool of coordination, but [as] a socially constituted system of social discipline…clock-time stands over and above individuals and dictates the pace and value of their actions and labours” (Martineau, 2012).

Alison Kafer explains that “disability [is] conceptualized in terms of time, affects one’s experiences of time, and render adherence to normative expectations of time impossible…timeliness, productivity, longevity, and development” (2021). A facet dictating human life is clock-time, which unfolds in a linear temporal sequence, traveling in one direction to reach an endpoint. Women are expected to go to school, attend university, acquire a nine-to-five job, get married, have children, and retire. Discourses of temporality assume a standard of progression of tasks and achievements from girlhood to womanhood.



As disabled women’s lives are orchestrated to the collective ticking of the clock, clock-time indicates a temporality premised on a singularity of how life is meant to be lived, as “able-bodied and able-minded” (Wälivaara, 2022). However, women with disabilities are situated outside the linearity of clock time. To illustrate, Amanda Bennetts is a media and installation artist living with a neurological disease and rare muscular condition. Her multimedia installation, I feel the weight of the minute as I bend my body towards the clock, charts that “time for the non-normative bodies is bent, stretched, slowed, rewound, expanded, and fastened. The rationing of energy, due dates, the time taken to perform a specific task, working hours, ideal hours of sleep that a body needs…are largely normative and fixed in nature” (Bennetts, 2023). Barriers to participation in the workplace exist when women with disabilities have to play catch-up with the clock.


Foundational to this policy brief is disability studies, a field which “establishes the factors that led to the structural, economic and cultural exclusion of people with sensory, physical and cognitive impairments” (Goodley, 2013). Goodley elucidates that “disability [is] a problem of society” (2013). Affirming Goodley’s definition, Kelly Fritsch writes that, “disability becomes…barriers to doing as well as barriers to being,” (2015) in which barriers to doing are indicative of built environments, supports, and financial stability. Barriers to being “[delimits] what is considered a life worth living” (Fritsch, 2015). Normative temporal structures of clock-time perpetuate an idealized way of life, evaluating what bodies are capable of meeting time’s expectations and what bodies are valued.

Tell Me More!

In the workplace, barriers to doing for disabled women entail their inaccessibility to participate in the workplace due to temporal expectations, leading to financial insecurity. Resultantly, barriers to being devalues disability as a life not worth living because they are unable to assimilate to clock-time.

 In the podcast, This American Life, host Sean Cole speaks to Jerome Ellis in Act One, Time Bandit about temporal accessibilities. Ellis, who stutters, describes a phone call experience from his previous job at Columbia Law Library which put him between temporal expectations: “So answering the phone, that’s one temporal expectation. And then having to explain to someone else who’s calling while the first person is on hold” (Cole & Ellis, 2020). An able-bodied person can absorb the task of a phone call without consciously thinking about how much time it may take them to say something. Disabled bodies undergo the stress of answering the phone the ‘correct’ way. The weight of the minute pressures Ellis to keep in time with a society that privileges speedy communication.

What Else?

Ellis also mentions to Cole in the podcast, “The stutter, it feels like this thing that is so deeply entwined with my body, my mind, my emotions” (2020). He further elaborates that “I don’t actually know how long it will take to say anything until I have to say it” (Cole & Ellis, 2020). He is also responsible for making a two-minute speech; however, Ellis breaks this rule by going over the time limit. If not, he would have to force the stutter to bend to the clock. Clock-time imposes itself on the temporalities of human activities. 

Likewise, if a disabled woman who stutters were to be employed as a receptionist, it is likely that she will undergo similar temporal expectations when answering the phone. Their human capital will be diminished in comparison to their able-bodied counterpart because her disability, perceived as a societal issue, prevents her from maximizing productivity, self-sufficiency, or independence when working her job within able-bodied norms. It is likely that she will lose her job, or be paid less because she is disabled, and because she is a woman. Nonetheless, if a disabled woman were to access the workplace, Amanda Burlock contends that “among women aged 15 or older who worked mainly full-time…those with disabilities reported $37, 070 of after-tax personal income, on average which was $2250 less than same-aged women without disabilities” (2017). Even Vandekinderen et. al, states that “disabled women frequently have fewer work opportunities and a lower wage than men with disabilities or non-disabled women for the…dominance of neo-liberal norm of economic productivity and employability” (2012) situates itself alongside clock-time, where bodies are disciplined around the norms of a standard working day. As Zerubavel puts it, “they are by no means expected to transcend the temporal boundaries of these periods” (1979). That said, employability and pay also defines recognition or negation of personhood. Vandekinderen et. al., stresses that “anything that is not in accordance with the norm — is marked inferior by the silent reduction of these bodies to a disposable status” (2012). 

Intersectionality

The intersection of being a woman with a disability, “affect the well-being because of their association with numerous employment-related factors, including personal income, occupation prestige, exposure to a stressful workplace, job autonomy, and job creativity” (Brown et. al, 2018). Likewise, it is disability and the designation of disability that speaks about “The straightness of linear time, the belief that becoming disabled is a single moment, tangible, identifiable, turning life into a solid, singular, static before-and-after” (Kafer, 2021). 


Gender and disability intersect in the workplace. Material-discursive practices in workplaces are often entangled with hegemonic masculinity, “attitudes and practices among men that perpetuate gender inequality, involving both men’s domination over women and the power of some men over other (often minority groups of) men” (Jewkes et. al, 2015) and exclude women. In addition to gendered norms, able-bodied norms judge the disabled body on what it is—as disabled, rather than their human capital. 


The intertwining of work and identity is material discursive. Defined by Goodley et. al, material discursive is the combination of “immateriality and materiality combined to produce affects and capacities” (2021). For instance, disability is part of the identity of the disabled woman; it is felt as part of their body eliciting emotions and sensory experiences as the disabled woman moves through the workplace. Material discursive informs the idea that disability is enmeshed into a neoliberal, able-bodied society and workplace, as well as temporal expectations.

What is Human Capital?

What are Able-Bodied Norms?

The Norm, and Abjection


According to Isabel Dyck, the workplace reflects “commodified labour within the social relationship of capitalism” (1999), as well as clock-time. She writes, “performative capacities were at a premium…Not being able to ‘perform’ as usual potentially threatened women’s financial security, and consequential access to a range of resources and opportunities, including housing” (1999). Work participation and an individual’s way of life is grossly entwined; the representation of the body as disabled attributes women’s position in the workplace as inferior to the able-bodied employee. Prioritizing workplace flexibility combats clock-time, bending it to meet the non-linear time of disabled women and their bodies. 


A study on Workplace Flexibility and Worker Well-Being by Gender by Jaseung Kim et. al, notes that a flexible work schedule, namely “the ability to change work start and end times…to take time off during work days for personal…matters” (Kim et., al, 2020) is beneficial to the well-being of the employee (2020). Additionally, workplace flexibility is “associated with greater job satisfaction…lower job stress, [and] daily fatigue” (2020). For instance, “the need for help increased the severity for each type of everyday activity among women and men. Among women with disabilities, aged 15 or older, 76.0% required help with heavy household chores compared with 53.9% among women with mild or moderate disabilities” (Burlock 2017). To illustrate, Blanchard takes from Chirstine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory, which states that “each action…has a fixed cost, and the total budget for each day is limited” (2020). The ‘spoon’ is the unit of measurement that determines the amount of energy a person has. Blanchard uses the example of taking a shower, where it may not seem costly for an able-bodied individual, however, each action of getting to the shower and out of the shower is extremely costly for a disabled person (Blanchard, 2020). Such actions are done at the cost of time; thus, workplace flexibility helps provide more time to the disabled woman who may need more spoons to complete a task. Likewise, Burlock notes that women with disabilities “felt their condition…aggravated…when they went out (47.6%)” (2017). Workplace flexibility allows women with disabilities to participate in the workplace without temporal expectations such as the nine-to-five workday. They can work from home and start the workday when they feel ready. 


Workplace flexibility does not work for all careers. Dyck writes, “being able to work part time or with flexible hours allowed [only] some women to remain in the labour force” (1999). Some professions, such as lawyers, doctors, or related fields requiring rigid routines do not make room for flexibility. Dyck provides an example: “an elementary school teacher discontinued supervising extra-curricular activities and resisted the scheduling of informal or formal meetings with staff, students or parents in lunch times or coffee breaks, which she needed to preserve as rest time” (1999). However, not all women with disabilities are fortunate enough to “restructure their work environments in order to maintain their relationship to the labour force and its material and social rewards” (Dyck, 1999). Schimmele et. al, notes that “women with disabilities…change the amount of their work, begin working from home, and take a leave of absence because of their condition” (2021). Even so, workplace flexibility may impose additional burdens, such as needing extra time to catch up on work not completed during regular working hours.


Additionally, Butler & Parr note that disabled women try to maintain an able-body identity in the workplace (1999) to not feel behind the clock, even if they are feeling aggravated and tired. In their study, a disabled woman noted that “I have to give 110 percent just to prove that I’m really with it and I can really do it” (1999). 


Time is the foundational issue at play. To reinforce the issue of clock-time on disabled women’s bodies, Kafer takes from Elizabeth Freeman’s definition of chromonormativity, “the refusing and resisting of [temporal expectations], thereby creating new affective relations and orientations to time” (2021), which speaks to how workplace flexibility bends normative clock time to meet the bodies of disabled women.



Yet despite all my research, there are several points I have missed. If time warrants, I will explore further on the background to policy on disability in workplace in Canada. Having more background and history on existing politics and how they were developed in important for looking at policy recommendations that address gaps or shortcomings in current legislation and practice. Likewise, strengthening the role of gender in this discussion through specifically providing an intersectional lens would provide a stronger analytical tool in this discussion.

Bibliography

Bend, Gemma. (2020). Under Pressure to Be 'Normal': An Exploration of the Material-Discursive Practices that Affect the Experience of Disability and Gender in Employment. Doctoral Thesis, The Open University Business School. https://oro.open.ac.uk/73800/1/Gemma%20Bend%20thesis.pdf 

Bennetts, A. (2023). I feel the weight of the minute as I bend my body towards the Clock. firstdraft. https://firstdraft.org.au/program/i-feel-the-weight-of-the-minute-as-i-bend-my-body-towards-the-clock 

Brown, R. L., & Moloney, M. E. (2018). Intersectionality, Work, and Well-Being: The Effects of Gender and Disability. Gender & Society, 33(1), 94–122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243218800636 

Burlock, A. (2017, May 29). Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report, Women with Disabilities. Statistics Canada. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-503-x/2015001/article/14695-eng.htm 

Butler, R., & Parr, H. (Eds.). (1999). Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of Illness, Impairment and Disability (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.4324/9780203979662 

Cole, S., & Ellis, J. (2020, August 10). Made to be Broken: Act One, Time Bandit. This American Life. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/713/transcript

Cooney, S. (2018, August 14). The Benefits and Downsides of Pay Transparency. Time. https://time.com/5353848/salary-pay-transparency-work/ 

Dyck, Isabel. (1999). Body troubles: women, the workplace and negotiations of a disabled identity. In Ruth Butler, Hester Parr (Eds), Mind and body spaces : geographies of illness, impairment and disability (pp. 117-134). https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.4324/9780203979662 

Fritsch, Kelly. (2015). Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-Corporeal Reconfigurations. Foucault Studies, 43–66. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i19.4824 

Goodley, Dan. (2012). DIS/Entangling Critical Disability Studies. Disability & Society, 28(5), 631–644. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.717884 

Goodley, D., Lawthom, R., Liddiard, K., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2021). Key Concerns for Critical Disability Studies. The International Journal of Disability and Social Justice, 1(1), 27–49. https://doi.org/10.13169/intljofdissocjus.1.1.0027 

Government of Canada. (2023, March 14). Roadmap to 2040 - A plan to Guide the Work of Accessibility Standards Canada. Accessibility Standards Canada. https://accessible.canada.ca/roadmap-to-2040 

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Kim, J., Henly, J. R., Lambert, S. J., & Golden, L. M. (2020). Workplace Flexibility and Worker Well-Being by Gender. Journal of Marriage and Family, 82(3), 892-910–910. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1111/jomf.12633 

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Vandekinderen, C., Roets, G., Vandenbroeck, M., Vanderplasschen, W., & Van Hove, G. (2012). One Size Fits All? The Social Construction of Dis-Employ-Abled Women. Disability & Society, 27(5), 703–716. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1080/09687599.2012.673275

Wälivaara, J. (2022, August 4). Out of Time: Crip Time and Fantastic Resistance. https://sfrareview.org/2022/07/19/out-of-time-crip-time-and-fantastic-resistance/

Zerubavel, E. (1979). Private Time and Public Time: The Temporal Structure of Social Accessibility and Professional Commitments. Social Forces, 58(1), 38–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/2577783 


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