Since time immemorial, women have banded together to provide services to their families and the community at large. In the twentieth century, in most times and places, women have predominated in the helping professions such as nursing, teaching, childcare, and social work, and have formed associations on this basis. The traditional female professions have been well-served by educators who have facilitated communications via various technologies and who have also developed unique programs to promote professional upgrading. For example, Memorial University's Telemedicine Centre, managed by women, has established educational networking for women in the health professions who live in remote areas or whose work precludes classroom attendance. At the University of British Columbia, two distance education nursing courses focus on nursing as a traditional female role and discuss the problems common to women in traditionally female professions. The University of Saskatchewan offers a course on Women and the Teaching Profession which, by its very existence, acknowledges a much-neglected professional group.

While by no means all women who study at a distance are, or intend to be, involved in traditional or non-traditional professions (indeed, female students much more commonly than male are without articulated career goals), it is significant that university curriculum finally takes seriously the special challenges women face as they attempt to juggle family and home responsibilities with studies and employment.

Among minority groups, to our knowledge only native women have received specific attention from distance educators. Athabasca University offers several programmes at Native Education centres throughout the province and more than eighty percent of native students enrolling in these programs are women. These women often bear an especially heavy burden of responsibility in their extended family and their community. Research into the effectiveness of study skills workshops related to these programmes has enabled Athabasca to provide more effective workshops. They now use smaller groups working at a slower pace with more emphasis on time management and anxiety management, and more information about teachers' probable expectations. In Labrador and Newfoundland, Inuit and Indian women have found Memorial University's teleconferencing programmes useful and supportive. We hope that in the future course developers will turn their attention to other minority women.

Karlene Faith, a native of Saskatchewan, received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Since 1982, she has been at Simon Fraser University in the Centre for Distance Education and the School of Criminology. She is the editor of Toward New Horizons for Women in Distance Education: International Perspectives (Routledge, 1988).

June Sturrock, a native of London, England, received her Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia. Since 1980, she has been at Simon Fraser University in the Centre for Distance Education and the Department of English. She is the editor of the Journal of Distance Education.