With the second approach to privatized training -- increased support for private sector sponsors, the costs are already making themselves felt, while the benefits remain unclear. Community colleges have seen a decrease of 40% in federal purchases of training within the last two years, while voluntary sponsored-training has experienced a 20% erosion. This trend is expected to continue for at least the next three years. Application processes and selection criteria within Canadian Jobs Strategy for sponsors do not seem to provide the funding agency, EIC, with a strong basis for differentiating between those who can and those who cannot run a high quality program. The result has been duplication of efforts and some extremely poor programs. These problems may sort themselves out as time goes on. However, there are two major sources of difficulty which are likely to remain. First, there is nowhere in policy anything which shows any necessary positive link between privatization and increased equality for women. During the course of our research on increasing equality for women, we were able to find no rationale for privatization. Secondly, our research indicates that there is in place an infrastructure of public and voluntary sponsors for training. This infrastructure, because of its non-profit status, is well-designed to provide longer term training in 'learning to learn' which is centered on the needs of the trainee, in contrast to employer-sponsored training which has an understandable bias toward short-term, skill-specific training oriented to the needs of the marketplace. Policy currently does not appear to discriminate between the two types of training, generic and skill-specific. The voluntary sector, despite its affinity through its non-profit status with the public sector in terms of goals of training, is included in the private sector for purposes of funding. Equality for women is a long-term goal. It would be naive to expect that the short- term demands of the marketplace would, on their own, generate the necessary changes. Policy -- and training programs -- which are explicitly not market-driven are an essential component of a long-term program of change directed to equality of women.

5.5 Outcomes

In the area of outcomes, we found a disturbing lack of connection between indicators of increasing equality for women and evaluative criteria used in assessing the outcomes of projects. Most projects continue to be judged by how quickly they move women into jobs or further training without regard for the quality of those jobs or the direction of the training. Generally, there is an unsettling lack of information on the long-term effectiveness of training. For example, except for CCLOW's Decade of Promise (58), we found no longitudinal studies assessing the impact and importance of publicly-sponsored training on women over a period of years. Based on the information that is available, however, we found that although individual programs have been excellent and many individual women have profited from them, it does not appear that adult education and training has had any significant impact on the improvement of the status of women as a group in Canada. In addition to an absolute lack in the amount of available training, and some problems with the quality of training, this lack of impact can be ascribed to a preoccupation in policy with 'fixing up' the skill levels and attitudes of individual women, rather than focusing on the societal conditions which create those inappropriate skills and attitudes initially.