Implications for Training

The preferred learning strategies of women, as described in our study and elsewhere, are most often relational (1). Relational learning involves the voice of personal relationship, holistic thinking styles based on metaphors and personal stories, recognizing truth through the interpretation of facts or the meanings given to experiences, using the ideas of others as a way to expand one's own knowledge and understanding, preferring to keep thought and feeling together, and resolving conflicts by reconciling differences (2).

Men most often use a competency based form of learning, which is the learning directly supported by formal training programs. Competency-based learning involves the voice of impersonal reason, analytical thinking styles based on examples, testing for truth by looking for consistency and logic in ideas, doubting or excluding ideas until their worth has been proven, preferring to hold thought and feeling apart from each other, and resolving conflicts by assessing the relative merits of competing perspectives (3).

The competency-based learning process is reduced to a simple and straightforward approach. Work processes are fragmented into discrete or particularized component parts, then turned into learning objectives that are observable and measurable. This particularizing process isolates work tasks from the context in which they occur and strips them of the meaning they derive from the activities in which they are embedded. The "good worker" must be able to reassemble particularized skills in such a way that she can make sense of her work and know when and how to apply specific skills within specific contexts and situations. The reassembling process is expected to result in the organization of work according to the expectations of the workplace.

Most of the women in our study do not organize work this way. Instead, they use an internal frame of reference in which the self is central, allowing them to integrate many different activities and to interact with many different co-workers in the accomplishment of the organization's work. Competency-based approach to training tends to remove the worker as the knowing, thinking, sense-making subject of her own acts, and instead, conceives of work as the property of the employer (4).

In learning terms, competency-based training does little to support the relational learning of most women, which can frustrate their attempts to keep themselves at the centre of their understanding and to give meaning to themselves, their work and their workplaces.

Joan McFarland and Dorothy MacKeracher are both feminist scholars, teachers, and researchers. Joan is a professor of economics at Saint Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. and a past-president of CCLOW. Dorothy is a professor of adult education at the University of New Brunswick, also in Fredericton.

1. Marcia Baxter Magolda, Knowing and reasoning in college: Gender-related patterns in students' intellectual development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1991.
2. Dorothy MacKeracher, "Women as learners," in T. Barer-Stein & J. Draper (eds.), The craft of teaching adults (expanded edition). Toronto: Culture Concepts, Inc., 1993.
3. MacKeracher.
4. Nancy Jackson, "Content matters: Training is never neutral," presentation to the TARP Working Group, Ontario Federation of Labour, Toronto, May, 1991.