Feminist Rehabilitation Counseling: Vocational Rehabilitation for Women with Disabilities in Global Contexts

People with disabilities are the most unemployed and underemployed minority group in the world, and women with disabilities (WWD) are further marginalized. Vocational rehabilitation (VR) is a human services discipline designed to support people with disabilities in obtaining and maintaining their employment goals. Competitive employment is a potential means for WWD to be empowered and to flourish by fostering a sense of economic security, encouraging community engagement, facilitating optimum levels of independence, contributing to the local economy, subverting the implications of poverty (e.g., limited healthcare, rehabilitation, and education access), and developing identities rooted in pride that often accompany the status of employed. These factors underlie the importance of instituting a feminist rehabilitation counseling lens. The notion of what constitutes human flourishing is both subjective and flexible and is based on the individual and their sociocultural contexts. Factors include but are not limited to employment and finances, education, marriage, motherhood, symptom management, self-esteem, social acceptance, and peace of mind. However, human flourishing means thriving as opposed to barely surviving, which is the status quo for many women with disabilities globally. The person-centered nature of human flourishing makes it an appropriate framework through which to analyze the experiences of women with disabilities and their pursuit of employment and well-being. The purpose of this paper is to bring feminist theory into rehabilitation counseling so that VR counselors and women clients can collaboratively and holistically illuminate individual meanings of flourishing and set rehabilitation goals that align with these perspectives. This paper will present feminist rehabilitation counseling (FRC) as a new framework with which to understand, navigate, and support employment endeavors of women with disabilities.