A medical transcriber talked about her efforts to learn the medical terminology she was expected to know: "I'd hear what it sounded like and look for that word in the dictionary. ... Every day I would make a list and that night I would go home and write them out until I had memorized them." She talked about how difficult this task was and how much it affected her self-esteem, especially since one of the pathologists for whom she worked was impatient with her need for learning. If she had failed to learn, she told us, she would have been fired.

About half our respondents had received formal training in the skills and techniques they used on the job. In spite of this, they all felt they had to learn additional skills and techniques, which could mean adapting a skill to a specific workplace or learning a new one. The stationary engineer, for example, told us that her certificate was "just a license to learn." Through careful experimentation, this engineer had taught herself how to chip the ice off the thermostats of large refrigeration units. Once she had learned this technique her supervisor regularly assigned her the task because no other workers wanted it.

A bank manager talked about first starting with the bank: "[When I was a trainee], I had the dubious honour of doing maternity leave for a senior teller and doing all the secretarial functions. There were three female trainees and ... all the male trainees were posted to positions [above the teller level] before any of us. The women turned out to be better managers because we ended up with a lot more technical experience and more human resource experience at the foundation levels."

Much of the technical knowledge reported by our respondents was learned without the benefit of formal training from employers or informal coaching from supervisors. Many of the women reported that they received no orientation to their workplace and no assistance to learn the specific technical knowledge required for their job; they just started to work and made do with whatever was at hand and whatever they could figure out themselves.

Social Knowledge
Social knowledge includes: understanding the social conventions of the workplace, finding a place within the social network of co-workers, and coping with authority relationships among workers and management.

Fitting into the workplace resulted in unexpected difficulties for some women. In order to help her understand the social conventions of her workplace, a receptionist at a counseling centre was encouraged to participate in the workshops offered to the counselors. Over time, she had learned so much that she was expected to orient new counselors and to help them learn the centre's social conventions. (The task of orienting new workers to the workplace was described by several respondents.) At the same time, she gradually became very skilled in interpreting psychological test scores and frequently was consulted by the counselors. She was not permitted to administer tests nor was she remunerated for her knowledge because she did not have the required formal credentials.

Some of the social conventions the women learned related to gender differences in attitudes toward doing work. A carpenter told us, "The boys kept telling me to slow down. ... [They thought] I was working too hard and I shouldn't have been. One of my jobs was to seal the basement. They got one of the boys to do it when it was raining one day. He didn't do it right and they had to tear all the insulation off and do it again. [The boss] said, 'I should fire all of you guys and hire eight more women just like her.' They laughed ...". She left her job shortly after we interviewed her.

All the women talked about the interpersonal relationships they had established in their workplace and about the roles they played in such relationships. They told us that their ability to work cooperatively with others, to listen to and talk with clients and co-workers, to help mediate disputes, to be helpful and caring when dealing with others, were important aspects of their work even when that work was quite technical.