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Loosely structured interviews were designed to discover the perceptions of workers involved in a European Social Fund (ESF) training project for unemployed British women regarding the intentions and results of the training scheme. A process of inductive coding for the transcript analysis was followed. The coding scheme developed from the interviews had nine main areas: research method; the workers; the funder's intentions; trainees' needs; workers within the funding scheme; management; the issues of difference between all the women in the project; achievements; and the "dream." Findings and analysis indicated that the aims and intentions of each group fell broadly into two categories: immediate and future or long term. The workers aimed to provide the trainees with a positive supportive learning environment that included the manual skills training. The workers' long-term aim was that the trainees should gain paid employment and economic independence. The trainees' long-term aspiration for future paid employment converged with the workers' aim to train women for employment. The workers' believed only a small number of trainees were actually interested in the manual skills training itself. The workers' unanimous opinion was that women were not being trained in skills suitable to the needs of the local economy. Some were suspicious of "built-in failure." (YLB)

The European Social Fund's (ESF's) emphasis on new technology training increased throughout the 1980s, but in the 1990s this emphasis disappears from policies toward "socially excluded" groups, including long-term unemployed women. Women are segregated into certain occupations and then further segregated by a hierarchical division that consistently favors men and is reflected in the gendered pay differentials. Furthermore, women are far less likely than men to be employed full time, but are more likely to be in temporary or part-time employment: lower paid and less secure. The importance of this gendered hierarchical and occupational segregation is that women have been restricted to the "low-skilled," low-paid, periphery occupations, with little authority or control. Linked to this concept of gendering is that of re-gendering. This continual process of gendering is related directly to changes within the processes of production and maintains the gendered power differential. New technology is also being "gendered." A research project that followed the general principles of "grounded theory" has shown that new technology training is no longer stressed in the European Union (EU) Priority Guidelines. This change has occurred at the same time as numerous EU Reports have consistently stressed the importance of new technology, especially for vulnerable groups, including women. The targeted working-class women are having the occupational key to the future effectively denied them. (Contains 60 references.) (YLB)

Case studies of vocational training/adult basic education programs for unemployed British women demonstrate that an explicit vocational focus in developing numeracy and literacy skills gives learners a tangible, practical objective. A noncompetitive atmosphere and feminist perspective also bring better results than many short-term training courses for the unemployed. (SK)

Study of women-only training centers established by the European Social Fund shows how they can be closed communities in which differences of race, class, or sexual preference can be identified as relationships of power, privilege, and inequality. (SK)