[I got] so much insight into myself; it was earth shattering. The amorphous nature of many life skills exercises irritated or confused some:

It's soft knowledge, I'm not used to that ... talking about very vague things like decision-making. It's wishy washy.

I'm not an abstract thinker ... a lot of the atmosphere was kind of abstract, in that there was no right or wrong way. ... When the course was over I was very confused. ... I came back again to the way I had always done things.

It was a waste of time. ... There was almost chaos initially. I don't think anyone knew what it was we were there for or how we would get new skills or whatever. ... We played a lot of guidance counsellor type games. ... Basically it was get to know yourself; try to find out what your skills are. Most people knew what their skills were. Most of them were rusty people who had worked 15, 20 years ago, and knew exactly what they could do, but maybe didn't have a whole lot of confidence.

I should add that another participant found this particular aspect of the course - that "you discover you have the same skills at 40 as at 20" - a useful self-discovery rather than a waste of time.

I was surprised by the extent to which so many women in the course reported that they had low confidence in themselves even when, in most cases, they struck me as very competent and articulate people.

Looking at our first job experience. How are we going to be able to do that? We were quite worried about that ... [we asked for] just a lot of reassurance on how to deal with people. ...The material in the course reinforced that even though we sat home and raised our kids we still had skills.

Another woman's comment may suggest the origin of this low self-esteem that she and others brought to the course:

For most of us up to that point in our lives we only were known as somebody's wife or somebody's mother. ...I didn't even know their husbands' names. It didn't matter. We were accepted as people not as part and parcel of something else.

To summarize, reactions to the course were highly variable. Among the twenty-two women I met, evaluations varied from "fluff" to the "best thing that ever happened to me."

On-the-Job Placements
My research indicated persistent problems with on-the-job placements in re- entry and SARS program's. The activities at the placement and the extent to which program organizers could supervise the workplace varied. There was disagreement among CEIC personnel and trainers about what the purpose of placements was. Some of the placements for WIM women were more useful than others, depending on what trainees were given to do. The most favorable comments came from women who were given a specific project they could carry out from beginning to end. However, others said they were not treated as management trainees, but as free clerical labour. One woman in a group of seven I interviewed said, "They didn't have a clue what to do with us."

Outcomes
If one defines the purpose of re-entry courses as assisting women to make the transition into the labour force, the WIM program was not a conspicuous success. Of the twenty-two women interviewed, only ten were in jobs that could be considered managerial and of these, eight had jobs which suggested a pattern. Three women were doing employment counselling, one for a private employment agency, two on short term municipal contracts. (A fourth woman, uninterviewed, had also gone into this field.) That trying to help people find jobs should be a source of employment for the unemployed is not surprising: social program's employing former clients is a general pattern. As well, many of the basic interpersonal skills required to counsel someone looking for a job (reinforcing self-esteem, role-playing) are a basic part of female repertoire and seeing these skills modeled in the WIM course clearly had an effect on these women.

The other five were employed by non-profit organizations: two charities and two hospitals. All were in charge of a department, but the jobs varied considerably in levels of responsibility; two would certainly be recorded in the census as supervisors rather than managers. The pattern that struck me was that these women 'managers' had reached the top end of what was still a traditional labour force place for women. Even with the best intentions and methods, the course did not break women out of their traditional segment of the job market.