Relations between feminists
The sheer scale, breadth and complexity of . the national training reforms have used up a great deal of feminist energies as we have fought to make spaces for women within the Agenda. The struggle has occurred on many different fronts simultaneously-in unions, in bureaucracies, in workplaces, in community organizations, in industry associations and in what now seems to be called the academy. In this process many gaps between women have opened up.

First is the gap between feminists concerned with the position of women in the paid workforce and those concerned with women who are unemployed or who have chosen not to enter the workforce. Given the strong focus on enterprise productivity and the contribution training can make to this and thus to national productivity and competitiveness, inadequate attention is being given to the training needs and interests of the 52% of women who are not in the workforce.

Feminists within the education system itself are rightly concerned not only with workplace interventions but also with the institutional interventions that women not in the paid workforce might see as desirable. Some form of opposition from feminists within TAFE has failed to understand the public policy agenda and the importance of economic independence for women and has drifted off to sometimes esoteric training for self-awareness. Yet other opposition derives from the failure of the national training reforms and even of other feminists in the labour movement to acknowledge or accept that public provision for women not in the paid workforce is of equal economic and social importance as that for women in the paid workforce. Tensions between feminists in TAFE and those in the union movement in particular exist, and while there is much cooperation at many levels, the systematic criticism of the public sector by the union movement or vice versa does little to either identify or resolve the tensions or the problems which confront us collectively.

The national training reforms offer little benefit to Aboriginal women, particularly those in remote communities, many of whom are still excluded from the paid workforce. Because their contribution to structural adjustment is regarded as non-existent, their needs are considered peripheral to the main game. The reforms offer only marginally more for women from non-English speaking backgrounds, principally if they are employed in the manufacturing sector and achieve derived benefits from enterprise bargaining and other workplace reforms in that sector. For women with disabilities, the national reforms per se are virtually irrelevant. An industry or market driven vocational education and training system offers little to these women. With a focus on the extrinsic value of vocational education and training-that is, the extent to which it produces more flexible and adaptable workers-attention to the intrinsic value of general vocational education has been minimal in the glamour of the debate about microeconomic reform and global competitiveness. The gap then widens between what Aboriginal women, women with disabilities and women from non-English speaking backgrounds want and have a right to demand from the vocational education and training system, and those women concerned with the general training needs of women with greater access to paid work.

The once close alliances between feminists in the schooling sector and women in the TAFE and training sector, represented through the Australian Women's Education Coalition, appear to have drifted away as vocational education and training has become more focused on the interface between education and the labour market. The interactions between feminists practically involved in training matters and those in the academy, with some notable exceptions, have also diminished, perhaps as Women's Studies as a field of knowledge has strengthened and different schools of feminist theory have emerged more clearly. I believe that the gap between the theory and the practice of feminism in vocational education and training has never been greater. For many of us, post-modernism is more obscure and inaccessible than post-Fordism.

There is a continuing need for fundamental research around feminist issues, and I do not expect the language of such research or theoretical discourse to be always easy or the concepts quickly grasped and applied by women delivering services or developing public policy. But much of the strength of the feminist movement has derived from the coincidence of feminist theory and political struggle, and one informing and nurturing the other. This link appears to be weakening, and vocational education and training and the feminist academy are both the worse for it.