SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Advertise and conduct career planning workshops or career fairs for re-entry women and for employed women contemplating occupational change to persuade them to consider non-traditional work.
   
   
2. Stress, in the promotion for these workshops, that they are designed to help women find interesting work that provides a sense of accomplishment.
   
   
3. Advertise these workshops in media that reach homemakers as well as employed women.
   
   
4. Ensure that women who already work in non-traditional jobs have a central role in career planning workshops and that these role models are women with whom the audience can identify.

These non-traditional workers should try to convey their enthusiasm, describe their work and explain why it interests them.

5. Career awareness for school age children should start as early as possible (Grades 1-3) with introduction to non-traditional fields by women working in these occupations. These women should be chosen for their ability to communicate the excitement their jobs hold for them. Hands-on experience, appropriate to the age level, would also be helpful.
   
   
6. Role models continue to be important to teen-age women. However, as well as emphasizing the interesting nature of their work, they should also address the issues that most concern teen-age women:

• women can remain feminine and still do non-traditional work
• women can be successful wives and mothers and still do non-traditional work
• women can be popular (with other women and with men) and still do
  non-traditional work.

Anything that enhances the excitement and glamour of a nontraditional job will also be useful in persuading teen-age women.

7. Whenever possible, emphasize computer-related jobs or computer related tasks in non-traditional jobs for both girls and women.
   
   
8. Reinforce the perception evident in this study that computer-work is gender- neutral.
   
   
9. Promote computer literacy among girls and women.
   
   
10. Encourage measures to ensure that math, science and technical curricula in school are not biased unnecessarily toward male interest.
    
    
11. Encourage women to become math, science and computer science teachers as role models for their students.
    
    
12. Encourage the manufacture of gender-neutral software.
    
    
13. Encourage the distribution of computers throughout school (not just in math and science areas).

Barbara Herring and Helen LaFountaine are co-partners in the Toronto-based company Avebury Research and Consulting Ltd.