As women, we are not strangers to processes that devalue work and working knowledge. Women's work has been the victim of such practices for at least two centuries of industrialism. We have learned that when others define women's work and skills, the definitions serve their interests and not ours. The outcome is no bargaining power, poor working conditions, low pay and a dead-end existence.⁴ Current innovations in vocational curriculum carry the battle over the determination of skill levels, power and pay from the workplace into the classroom. The concept of competence is at the heart of this transformation.

Female-dominated areas of vocational education and training may be particularly vulnerable to the imposition of a competency based approach at levels where it would be (in fact is being) resisted among males. A brief look at the program areas in which a competency approach was first implemented in Ontario and British Columbia will illustrate this concern. On the one hand, it has been widely used in pre-apprenticeship or pre-trades level programs, in selected programs for equipment operators (e.g. steam shovel operator, dishwasher operator), and in a number of special occupational programs for mentally or physically handicapped students. Most of these programs are in male dominated areas of employment using basic manual skills. On the other hand, the competency approach has been introduced in a range of programs for white-collar, female-dominated occupations in the clerical, social and health care fields, such as early childhood education, human service work, general nursing, medical and dental assistance and office administration.⁵ These programs focus on a considerable range of manual, cognitive and affective skills.

The contrast between these two general areas of application is striking and disquieting. The problem is illuminated in the following comments of a college administrator about the suitability of the competency approach for various areas of instruction:

The training is appropriate for certain kinds of areas, but it's not a panacea by any stretch of the imagination...It's (appropriate for) ... a highly physical type of thing, where you're not necessarily expecting someone to know how a (piece of equipment) works... as long as it will, and you are able to manipulate it, and at a certain speed, and a certain level. That's what we are guaranteeing.

It would be hard to argue that this framework is adequate to cover all of the occupational skills for which the competency approach is currently in use. Instead, these remarks are indicative of familiar ways of thinking that discredit women's work and skills. The danger is that the forms of training adopted will institutionalize a view of female-dominated programs as low-skilled and will enshrine in the curriculum itself a degraded version of female occupational skills, rather than an expansive or developmental one. I would argue that this is not an acceptable role for public institutions of learning at any level, and that it will not serve the long-term educational interests of Canadian women.

The popularity of competency approaches is not the only cause for concern about the current quality of institutional training opportunities for women. Recent assessors of the federal government's Canadian Jobs Strategy have complained about the diluting of instruction through emphasis on on-site work experience, the continuing ghettoization of women in low-paying dead-end fields, and the persisting failure of educational institutions to meet the learning needs of under-educated women.⁶ So perhaps it is time for feminists to focus on problems of content and quality, as well as access and quality, of training opportunities for women. We must take care that vocational relevance in education does not become, as Carol O'Donnell has so aptly put it, "a euphemism for... education on the cheap".⁷

Nancy Jackson has taught women's studies and the sociology of education in Vancouver since 1977. She is currently a visiting Ph.D. student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. She has been active in the Women Skills Development Society of Vancouver, researching the impact of technological change on women's work and education.