It has long been rumoured that women face more barriers to training than men and hence have been under-represented in training programs. Some recently acquired gender specific data for New Brunswick backs up such a rumour, at least in regard to this province. Focusing on the  the availability of sponsorship as a barrier to training, the research attempts a gender-based analysis of government sponsored programs offered in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's in New Brunswick and women’s eligibility for and participation in them.

The backbone of federal training has been the apprenticeship and the Canadian Employment and Immigration Commission (CEIC) seat purchase programs. In the former, started during WW II, women have always been grossly under-represented. In New Brunswick, over the 1985-97 period, the average number of women in the program was 48, which amounted to 2.3% of those in the program. Under CEIC seat purchase, women were 43% of the total for the year 1992-93, the year for which I was able to get data. This amounted to 6782 women out of a total of 15753 in the program that year in New Brunswick. However, this figure does not tell us anything about the type or length of the training involved.

During the eighties, the Canadian Jobs Strategy and later the Labour Force Development Strategy were introduced. These offered targeted, short term training which included an on-the-job segment. Some 9758 women (38.9% of the total) were trained in one year under CJS in New Brunswick. Within CJS, there was a Re-entry program, a woman-only program, targeted specifically to women who had been out of the labour force for at least three years. In the end, re-entry programs only reached a small number of women. Data for 1986-87 shows that only some 341 New Brunswick women were in Re-entry that year. Under the Labour Force Development Strategy,  introduced in 1989, CJS programs were modified. Re-entry continued under the rubric of “project based funding.” However, women-only training was dropped in favour of an “integrated” approach- much to the alarm of women’s training observers and organizations.

During the 1992-98 period, NB Works, the much touted joint provincially-federally financed demonstration project was introduced. It specifically targeted social assistance recipients with less than grade 12 education. During the 1992-98 period, the three year program offered on-the-job training, academic upgrading, training and job placement for three cohorts of up to 1000 participants each. This was not a woman-only program but certainly a female dominated one. Women made up 84% of the participants.

The CEIC seat purchase program ended abruptly with the 1996 Employment Insurance Act. Its replacement is the Skills, Loans and Grants program. SLG was conceived as a loan/grant program that would make individuals responsible for at least part of the financing of their training. Only present and recent unemployment recipients are eligible for funding.

SLG, administered by the province, has been in effect since October 1997. However, there is an anomaly in the program. What was conceived as basically a loan program- not unlike the Canada Student Loans program- is, for the present, a purely grant program. This is because the province has not been able to find a financial institution to underwrite the loan portion of the program. The result has been a bit of a bonanza for those who meet the SLG eligibility criteria.

Gender-specific data shows that, to date, males in New Brunswick have taken greater advantage of this bonanza than females. I estimate that only 1628 females per year have received SLG grants meaning that females are only 35.8% of recipients. And looking at more specific situations, such as grants to attend schools such as the sought after Information Technology Institute in Moncton, females make up only 24.7% of the grant recipients.

In conclusion, female representation in sponsored training in New Brunswick in the last three decades through the apprenticeship program, the CEIC purchase program and the Canadian Jobs Strategy has been spotty at best. And where women have been targeted as participants, the number of women trained has been small. Recently, targeting has been more and more narrow- going to social assistance recipients and leaving out other groups of women. With the more or less complete withdrawal of sponsorship except for the current, but no doubt short-term, anomalous SLG situation for those eligible, the future opportunities for sponsored training for women in New Brunswick appear very bleak indeed.