h .) Implement action steps

• try it; then go back to step (a)
• collect any information required about the results of this step.

For this report, the implementation or action step was the writing, printing and distributing of the report. The turn-around time on this step is important. A report of this size takes considerable time. By the time it is distributed many of the statistics are already stale. A better solution would be to have small groups develop individual parts of such a report and distribute these as they become available.

Problems and comments

As we worked our way through this project, we encountered a number of problems which need to be mentioned. In addition we found a number of general comment which did not fit into any other part of the report. These are also included at this point.

1. There is a general shortage of information about women and learning activities. There is considerable information about women and work, women and the law, women and the family, women as mothers, and so on; but very little about learning activities or educational institutions or training programs and women. All the useful sources we encountered are included in the bibliographies accompanying each unit. The literature that is available tends to discuss program successes rather than failures; people as unisex learners rather than as males and females; those who are already involved rather than those who are not involved; those who succeed rather than those who drop-out or fail.

Other problems of this type are that:

• information is not readily available to the general public. We required inside contacts to obtain some information.

• if it is available, it is not in a form which is directly useful. We had to re-work some data. Other data were available only as raw totals and these needed to be refined for our purposes.

• agencies do not keep or compile information because they have no resources to do this (money or people) and they do not know what is the most useful type of information to keep. The agencies we contacted would have been most willing to provide such information if they had known last year what was needed.

• the information kept is categorized by concepts which are not necessarily relevant to women. For example, "number of dependents" may be a useful way to categorize the primary wage earner; but "number of children at home" may be more useful for women as wage earners. In fact, "Women by age of children/women without children" might be a more relevant category for women than marital status. Our impression is that women are more likely to define themselves according to the presence/absence of children; whereas men are more likely to define women by the presence/absence of a man.

Many agencies would be willing and able to supply solid information about women as learners, if a group such as CCLOW were to provide a set of workable categories, relevant to women's programs, to individual women learners, to the problems and solutions encountered by each, to specific encounters with the bureaucracy of educational agencies, etc. Working out these categories is the hard part of this process.

In the absence of information about women and learning activities which dealt with the specific areas involved in this report, we tended to rely on information about women and work. While all education is not directed toward employment preparation, a good proportion of it is. Almost universally, lack of appropriate employment opportunities for the educated or trained woman reduces participation in learning activities of all types. when jobs are scarce, those that are available go to men first. Therefore, both families and governments prefer to spend their education and training funds on males first; then on females as conditions improve. There is a greater financial risk involved in educating women and girls and that risk is that women do not provide as great a financial return on the funds provided for their education as do men. This is not the fault of women, but is a condition of our present economic and social value system.