In Winnipeg, Debbie and I decided we would look at why there were so few women course leaders. I knew that some would give the answer, "It's because the unions involved are male dominated." Well then, why are male-dominated unions picked for WEST programs in the first place? Why wasn't there a conscious effort to make it half and half, male and female?

I realized I don't think there are enough women involved in a lot of things. The unions and the federation of labour stress women's issues and equality - and yet it seems like they don't practice it themselves. In my union we're about eighty percent women and we've got no real representation in the executive. We finally have one woman now that is an organizer.

I saw the research as kind of an "in" to getting at why women aren't more involved. Not only why women aren't more involved in literacy but why they aren't more involved in other aspects of their life. I think some of it is literacy. A lot of women don't come to meetings because they figure they won't understand what's being said.

But I also think the union is one place in our life where we don't have to take care of anything. The men will take care of the union business. When you're taking care of the house and the kids and everything else, it's one place where you don't have to worry. You go to somebody else and they fix it.

I think this could be both good and bad. When you have men fixing all your problems in the union, they're not always fixed the way you want them to be. And most men would really have to be trained well to understand a woman's views or problems as well as a woman would. She knows what she's going through and most men can't relate to it.

The research process

Once we got started, I found doing the research really exciting. I had to try and control myself sometimes because I'd come home and start to think about all these wonderful things we could do and it would end up being ten years worth of work! I'd thought about going to the classes to find out why women aren't coming out in the workplace, or what happens if you have a man in a woman-dominated workplace or vice versa - are the issues felt the same?

In the end, because of things happening in our lives and because the WEST program lost its funding for a while, the research ended up mainly being us looking at ourselves as women in the program: what we had to go through to be course leaders, what the training was like for us as women, how literacy has changed us, and how we've helped other people.

Sometimes it didn't feel like we were doing research at all! It was more like keeping a diary instead of doing a research project because it was all about us . Even when I interviewed the one other woman course leader, it didn't seem so much like research because a lot of what she was experiencing, I was experiencing the same! I was interested in it and, to me, research was something you didn't care about. In school you research how the giraffe lives.