TRAINING

Lack of Government commitment to the achievement of Decade goals training is particularly apparent since the Government funds, and thus controls, so much of the training that is provided in Canada.

Since the establishment of the National Training Act, there has been a noticeable decrease in the already meager share of training spaces available to women.

• The majority of women continue to train for traditionally female occupations, men for traditionally male occupations*.
  
  This occurred in spite of the Skills Development Leave Task Force Report** that concludes: " Of people added to the workforce in the next ten years, over two thirds are expected to be adult women."
  
  
• The expected influx of women into the labor force will necessitate the provision of increased opportunity for training. Thus, in the decade ahead it will be essential to reverse the decline in women's access to training.

At present, the programs under the National Training Act have been replaced by the Canadian Jobs Strategy (CJS), a policy and set of programs which are likely to have even more of a negative impact on women's training opportunities. The focus of the Canadian Jobs Strategy is to "privatize" the responsibility for job-related training and to provide funding incentives to employers for training employees in employer-relevant areas.

Although targets are set for training particular groups under the various aspects of the CJS (e.g., youth, re-entry, long-term unemployed, etc.), controls to monitor the amount and type of training women receive have not been put in place. Employers are primarily concerned about meeting the present skills needs of their corporations. Thus, without government controls, they are unlikely to set priorities for training women for non-traditional jobs or for job sectors that have a future, if those jobs have no direct corporate relevance.

Given that women have never received their fair share of government funding for training, particularly for jobs in non-traditional areas, these trends toward privatization are indeed disturbing. For some time, considerable discussion had occurred between the government and women's advocacy groups about the issue of expanding women's training for non-traditional jobs. This discussion centered on what proportion of women within an occupation would be sufficient to designate a category as "non-traditional". As a result, the proportion was raised and a larger number of jobs were added to the "non-traditional" category. This decision could have had a beneficial effect on women's employment opportunities. since government funding to train women in relevant skills would have been expanded. Now that responsibility for training women has largely been left to employers, it is unlikely that women will receive even the limited opportunity for non-traditional training that had been made available to them under the National Training Act.

In addition, there is no particular reason to believe that employers will ever spend as much on training women for a occupation as they spend on men. Data collected within the 1976-1985 timeframe*** reveals that employers, in fact. were more likely to invest their training dollars in male employees. This was especially true in the areas that had been identified as being important to women's on-going job opportunities (i.e., skilled trades).

During the Decade, the only real initiative to train women for a broader range of job options came from the Federal Government, but even that training was becoming less available to women over the ten-year time period. Now that the Government has decided to privatize training, it is almost certain that women's opportunity to train for more diverse occupations will be reduced even further.

* Boothby, D. Women Re-entering the Labor Force and Training Programs, 1986.

** Skills Development Leave Task Force Report, Employment and Immigration Canada, 1984.

*** Devereaux, M. One in Every Five, Statistics Canada, 1985.