Most of the women told us they valued their work because it contributed to their sense of personal worth and that this value was at least as important to them as the wages they received. One of the most often cited benefits was that the respondent was "learning the trade" or that she was grateful "to have any job." Most of the women in the study had similar explanations about how the quality of their work somehow compensated for the inadequacy of their pay.

Personal Knowledge

When asked what knowledge and skills were most important to the effective performance of their jobs, most respondents described qualities rather than skills. These qualities included empathy, patience, compassion, tenacity, confidence, determination, co-operativeness, commitment, flexibility, persistence, and so on. We came to the conclusion that many of the skills described by women as crucial to their competence are both invisible and unarticulated because they are viewed rather as qualities. And their invisibility increases because they are "woman" qualities.

A security officer attributed her flexibility to her experience as a full-time housewife and mother, and a secretary noted the importance in her job of being able to "switch gears, be versatile." The non-profit agency coordinator commented that "being able to do a lot of different things and being able to know what to do when and which first" was an important aspect of her job. She saw this characteristic as "important for women in particular because of the stress of running your own home, especially if you have children."

Patience, empathy and sensitivity were also seen as mother-like. A counsellor told us: "I hate to say this, but you have to be a 'Mom' to be in this kind of job. You have to be a giving person. You can't be self-centred and it is certainly not a job you'd use to climb anywhere from." A secretary told us that patience was one of her most important qualities: "You need patience ... without losing your cool. You have to be able to listen to complaints or listen to what they have to say without flying off the handle." Another aspect of patience, discussed by many of the women, involved being able to cope with many interruptions and being able to move between several different tasks without becoming upset or confused.

Most of the women in the study received very little positive feedback from employers, supervisors and co-workers. Throughout the interviews, however, we saw that as they talked about themselves as workers, the women gave themselves positive feedback about their own worth. This suggests that employment training programs, as well as employers, could assist women by developing opportunities to receive positive feedback both from co-workers and from hearing themselves talk about their own competence. Such opportunities might also help women discover ways to affect how their jobs are valued by others.

Integrated Knowledge

While the women in the study recognized that many aspects of their work were externally determined and logically organized around tasks, most described an internal frame of reference in which their work was organized around the self and tasks were accomplished largely through a network of interpersonal relationships with co-workers.

A police officer described her method for approaching the scene of a car accident. She had to first calm herself down and, at the same time, make tentative plans to guide her actions when she arrived at the scene based on what she found there. Her immediate concern was with the well-being of those involved. She had to be prepared to call other persons into action--ambulance drivers, fire fighters, other police officers--and direct and integrate their activities. The organization of work implied in her description centres on herself as the person who is to do the work. She is responsible not only for her own technical and social actions but also for integrating the actions of others by knowing when and who to call for specific assistance.

Integrated knowledge provides the woman with an overarching set of concepts that integrate technical, social, contextual and personal working knowledge into a unified whole. Such descriptions are no longer "job descriptions" as might be developed by an employer, but are descriptions of what the individual woman does on the job and how she organizes her own work. Integrated knowledge is neither officially recognized nor paid for by the employer.