When women start to talk about some of the things that make it hard to get to programs, very often the first comments focus on responsibilities in the home, with their families.

• [Housework] all has to wait until I get home. It's one rush-around...It's just waiting for me.

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• I think ladies have more responsibility than guys do. There's times when I drifted off because I know I left something undone. And there were days I couldn't concentrate because I knew there was something I didn't do at home or someplace else.

  To try to go to school and have the responsibility of our home-you can't really concentrate because we have more responsibility than a guy does. He can come and go and he doesn't have to look after the kids and cooking and cleaning and things that we have to do. I think that what we're kind of lacking is we don't give enough time for our self and we're not really thinking of us instead of a lot of other things.

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• I don't do my housework the same, I do it at night and go to bed late. I don't see my mother-in-law like I used to. I would do her housework on the weekends. Now I can't do it.

• Some men have to take daycare and childcare into consideration, but certainly nowhere near the percentage of the women. And they're faced with the same financial difficulties in a lot of cases. But I think the men just don't have as many responsibilities at home as the women do.

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• I want to come to school and I have to look after two families, my parents, my sister, sometimes my in-laws too. I decide I am coming to school, but it's very hard. I wish somebody was there to help me, but nobody is there to help me. My husband, he just goes to work. He helps me, but ...

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• I had to tell my Dad I had to come back to school... to quit being his partner in the car business and also had to give up doing most of the cleaning in the house, gardening and grass cutting and cleaning up. Also keeping the house tidy for mum. She works during the day. And also making suppers.

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• If they do happen to believe that they do want to go to this course and do want to leave the family for two evenings or a weekend or whatever, people don't agree with them. So the values are imposed on them within their culture, just like all of us, I guess. It's really hard to be strong enough to end up with what you want.

  And often, the kind of women that we get involved with in tutoring anyway ... haven't been successful in school and so they don't have enough confidence to sort of demand it. So I'm sure that some of the people who don't turn up for tutoring or for appointments-I know that they probably have a myriad of reasons... The big one is the family, the husbands.

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• Some of the men have called the school and said "What are you teaching my wife?" These are all married women who have raised their children and want to get back in the workforce...

  The women would go home and, if they didn't feel like cooking supper, they wouldn't say "Get it yourself." But they would say, "I don't really feel like cooking it right now... " So it was assertive, it wasn't aggressive.

  They were used to being passive because they were in the home, took care of the children, took care of the husband, took care of the house and that was their role. They had seen no role for the husband doing any of that work. The women's day was from seven in the morning until eleven at night...

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