Many women without children in their care who become homeless in Canada remain homeless for many years. Yet their experiences remain misunderstood and largely ignored because of the ways we define and measure homelessness in Canada.

I have worked in the women's emergency shelter system in Hamilton, Ont., since 2012. I have met many women who have been navigating homelessness for years - with no permanent solution to their housing crisis. For my PhD in social work, I interviewed 21 women who had experienced homelessness for a year or longer in Hamilton. I asked them about their experiences, and through art-based activities, about their ideas for housing and support.

What I learned in the interviews, combined with existing research, highlights a hidden crisis. Within our current system resides a profound human cost that manages, instead of resolves, homelessness.

Many women who experience homelessness do so for far longer than the federal government's definition of chronic homelessness, which is six consecutive months or 18 months over three years. Research from the United Kingdom that focuses on long-term and unresolved homelessness for women found that the ways women experience homelessness is to "go around in circles" without having their housing or support needs met.

Among the women I spoke with, more than half had been experiencing homelessness for 10 years or longer. Six of the the women said they have never had a safe place of their own to live for the entirety of their adult lives.

All of the women who participated in this project accessed the services offered by the homeless serving sector, including shelters and outreach workers, designed to resolve their homelessness. Yet none of these women were able to have their housing and support needs met.

This means their experience of homelessness has persisted for years, and even decades.

More than half of the participants I spoke with first experienced homelessness before they turned 18. Their primary route into youth homelessness was gender-based violence. They ran away from home when they were teenaged girls to escape violence and became caught in a cycle of events that include: hospitalization, incarceration, staying in youth shelters, living in group homes and unsafe places.

The Pan-Canadian Women's Housing and Homelessness Survey, as well as a study on Toronto youth, echo what the women I spoke with told me. Studies from the United States also confirm similar patterns - homelessness begins early in life for a majority of women, and is often followed by a chronic, chaotic churn of precarious housing and homelessness situations.

The women in my study described a frustrating and exhausting cycle of going among institutions such as hospitals, jails, emergency shelters, drop-in programs and transitional housing programs. They had all spent periods of time living outdoors, in encampments, in motels, with unsafe people and in other precarious and temporary housing arrangements. This phenomena is well-documented in existing Canadian research.

The Canadian government defines those who have been homeless and using shelters for more than 180 days a year as experiencing "acute chronicity."

Another term used by the federal government for individuals who have accessed shelters at least once in each of the last three years is "prolonged instability."

People who meet one or both of these criteria are considered to have the highest housing needs in the country.

According to recent federal data, women and gender-diverse people across Canada experience slightly higher rates of acute chronicity than men (13.4 per cent for men, 15.4 per cent for women, and 13.9 per cent for gender-diverse people). But the real numbers for women are likely much higher due to under-reporting.

Research shows women remain invisible to official systems during periods of homelessness. For example, the available data relies solely on information about emergency shelter usage. It does not capture experiences of homelessness that occur outside of the shelter system.

Women are less likely than their male counterparts to access shelters and other formal supports. Instead, they rely on precarious, unsafe and temporary housing arrangements to navigate homelessness.

In Canada, there are also fewer emergency women-specific shelter beds than for men

For the women I spoke with, the official 180 days or three years that makes someone officially chronically homeless in Canada does not even begin to describe the length and complexity of their experiences of homelessness.

They described wanting to live in supportive, gender-specific housing programs that foster community and care. Highly supportive housing typically integrates health and social services and a range of other support services. This type of integrated housing does exist across Canada - examples are the Block Line Supportive Housing Program operated by YWCA Kitchener-Waterloo and the Women's Building (Alpha House) in Calgary - but there is not enough of it.

The current measurements from the government of Canada fall short of capturing the complexity of the homeless experience for many Canadian women.

Government officials must therefore not only rethink their definitions of those in the most housing need, they must develop responsive housing solutions to meet the needs of women who have been homeless for many years.