3.4 Outcomes

Training and education is always for some purpose. CCLOW's concerns regarding outcomes have historically been focussed on the need to decrease the occupational segregation of women by using training and education as a means of moving women into non-traditional jobs and 'jobs with a future'.

It is important to recognize that outcomes can be both positive and negative, intended and unintended. For any individual woman involved in training, outcomes are likely to involve some combination of both positive and negative effects. Although a particular training program may have as one of its positive outcomes a widening of job opportunities for a trainee, it may result in negative outcomes -- increased friction at home, or changes in outside friendships.

At the policy level, analysis of outcomes usually has to do with evaluating the degree of 'match' between intended and actual outcomes.

CCLOW's primary concern is whether any particular women's job-related training program does result in an increased range of high-quality occupational choices for the individuals involved. Previous CCLOW research has found that past federal training programs have trained primarily in the primary and secondary sectors where jobs are disappearing (42). As we have noted in the previous section, early results from Canadian Jobs Strategy programs are not encouraging.

Although federal and provincial policies support in principle the idea that the outcomes of training ought to be the ending of occupational segregation for women and the narrowing of the wage gap, practices do not appear to be explicitly oriented in that direction. Earlier in this report, we discussed concerns with the outcomes of Canadian Jobs Strategy programs and apprenticeship programs. More generally, statistics regarding the wage gap and occupational segregation do not reveal any significant improvement during the past 20 years (see Chart 6, Table 8). The recent Economic Council report reveals that although women at the university level have made good progress at entering formerly non-traditional areas, the structure of the labour market has not begun to show any corresponding shifts (43).

These results raise questions about the role of education and training in generating these outcomes. Training does not, in itself, create jobs. A number of commentators have agreed that education is necessary, but not sufficient to create the changes which are needed for women (44).

Of critical importance here is the emerging employment picture described earlier in this report -- of a small high-wage core of people with secure and interesting jobs, surrounded by a much larger periphery of poorly-paid people with little security and virtually no control over their economic lives. Currently, at the policy level, outcomes are not explicitly evaluated in the light of whether they expand or contract the range of high quality future choices for women, both within and outside of the paid labour market.

Although there are certainly good programs with good outcomes for the individuals involved, it is difficult to find anything to be very optimistic about with respect to policy (45). What is needed is a cradle-to-grave education system for women in which skills training is only one small component of a comprehensive effort to assist each woman to achieve her full potential on her own terms no matter where she lives, what her racial or ethnic background is, or how poor her parents are or were. The skills training component of a woman's learning needs to be oriented to good quality jobs. The fact that we are very far from such an ideal is reflected in the results of education and training for women. For the most part, women are inadequately prepared for the world that existed 10 years ago, let alone the one coming in 10 years' time.