 International Council for Distance Education has paid for quite a while attention to the important issues of women in distance education. We now have the opportunity to discuss a number of questions that seem to us crucial these days. So we are going to introduce ourselves, a group of four women professionals in distance education. My name is Gisela Pravda. I have worked in distance education for many years. But during the last six years, I have been working training women in Latin America in Colombia. I'm back to distance education in the institution I have worked with, which is a research institution. And I'm trying to get the most out of it from what I have learned in Colombia for distance education and women's issues. My name is Nderikio Elizabeth Ligate. I come from Tanzania. I'm the director of South African Extension Unit, an institution which provides educational opportunities for South African exiles who reside in Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Angola, and Uganda. I am Claire Matheson, I'm currently director of University Extension at the University of the South Pacific. The University Extension section is responsible for providing distance education to 12 Pacific nation states and also for undertaking community and continuing education programs in country. Before going to this developing world region, I worked in New Zealand, which is a developed region in relative terms. And I am very concerned about the different access opportunities that I can perceive in those two work environments. I am Barbara Spronk from Athabasca University, where I am an associate professor of anthropology. I've worked at Athabasca since 1974 in a number of positions. And as Canada's only open university, Athabasca has a great deal of involvement with women's issues since 66% of our students at the moment are women. Now, I would like to open the discussion with the following question. What are the main problems and issues facing women's education, particularly in the developing world? My personal experience is the main problem is lack of opportunities. It is not finance. It is not many other things. But first of all, lack of opportunities. I would like to hear you comments on this experience of mine. Well, just to add to what you've said, Jisla, lack of opportunities is the most important thing. And I suppose you are referring to conventional education, where just a few women have access, because it is the men, really, who get access to education. It is the men in the developing countries who are given chance, because women are known to be people who must be in the kitchen, who must look after the family. So they are the very last ones to be let out to go to education. And parents are not ready to pay money to educate women. They would rather educate men. Unfortunately, my experience is that non-traditional ways of education do also leave women out in a different form. But still, women are left out again with these ways of education, which are supposed to be especially adequate for women. I would like to concur with what you're saying there, Jisla. We are most concerned in the Pacific region that the proportion of women enrolled in the Distance Program is only 30%, 70% male enrollment, which is precisely the same ratio as we have in the traditional educational world. We are undertaking major research project to find out why this is, but a lot of it relates to cultural conditions, which in fact are different in each of the 12 member countries. In some Polynesian countries, the enrollment of women in distance education can be as high as 70% in Malinese countries as low as 12%. We may find that this is culturally determined. I think it's also economically determined in that fees for distance education, even if they're low, are still very high for women in subsistence economy conditions. I think the enrollments are also low in developing regions in that distance education is also first chance opportunity for many men. And so when we are looking at sponsorship and funding, men still tend to take priority because they too are seeking opportunities that they have not had under traditional systems. Our experience in Canada is somewhat different. I have already mentioned that 2 thirds of our learners at the moment are women. And this has been consistent since Arthur Basque opened its doors in the early 1970s. And yet, our materials, I don't think, adequately reflect the needs and interests of women who are successful in attracting women to our programs. But I don't think we meet their needs once they're there as adequately as we might. I think many of the material, including the material I have been using in Colombia, which was Colombian material, distance education material, I would even call hostile to women. It doesn't address women. They don't appear in the neither worlds nor visualization. All the knowledge is built on men's experience. And you can even get a visualization, which is so hostile to women that you can have a face of a man representing opportunities and a face of a woman representing dangers in the world. Have you similar experiences? We do. I was just adding to what you have said in the sense that women have also a hostile environment because they cannot leave their children, say, for example, to go away. So when they want to go to educational institutions, it's not easy. They've got to look after their families. So what we would like to see is that these women are given a better environment where somebody might take care of their dependence while they go to study. I would just like to comment on some moments where I really doubted that women will get on quickly in their education. I asked the mother of one of our girls or young women in the program, what would she think about the program? And her answer was, what right have I to think? I mean, the environment is hostile in different aspects. It doesn't give them the liberty to leave their home. They have all the responsibility. And they find themselves in a world where they are taught not to think, or at least not to speak up. We encourage all our learners to talk seriously with their families before they set out on a distance education course, even one course. Never mind a whole program, because their success in the program is so dependent on the kinds of support that are available to them, whether their time is going to be freed up. This is critical for women, because I think women take on so many tasks in their daily lives that they just assume that this is one more task they can take on, establishing themselves as learners at the university level, thinking, I can do this, I'm at home with small children. When, in fact, they find that their study time is very, very limited, usually they're studying between the hours of 11 at night and two in the morning, because that, in fact, is the only time they have available to themselves. So even for women studying at home, issues like childcare are critical. And there are some things, Gisle, that I would not presume to want to change in a region like the Pacific. I think the institution has to be more flexible in relation to the culture that is there. Now we can do that by making the semester longer to accommodate the demands that are placed on women. We will never change the fact, and neither, perhaps should we, that their commitments to their church, to their community, to their extended family, those things will come first and they must come first, and we can't presume that we would change that. So if we can get the academic faculty to agree to extend the distance semester from 15 weeks to 30 weeks, that should enable them to accommodate those other priorities, which will always be more important in their lives. And I think the institution has to do more to change and to endeavor to change those things on the ground. Right, I quite agree. Flexibility. Sorry, I'm agreeing to flexibility is very important. It is interesting that you said in Atabaska, you do give women, or you advise women to discuss with their families. That is not the case in Africa, really, because women cannot sit down with their husbands and discuss about their education. Many times they are not really able or they are not encouraged to do so. Do they have husbands? Yeah, many of them have got husbands, yeah. Husbands and children who have got to be looked after. They don't have the chance, really, of discussing with them. This, I'm talking of the rural women, you know, women who probably we just need to give literacy and post-listeracy work. They will not be able to discuss with their husbands. So it means that the system must allow for them either to get somebody to follow them, really, in their environment and give them some education there. But to say that they will sit down with the family and discuss with their husband and other people to let them through probably it wouldn't work. But we can encourage the system of education or the minister of education to allot people to go closer to them and study some study centers and also provide a place where their children could be left for a little while. I'm really glad you raised that point, Elizabeth, because even in a country like Canada, we have many women-leaders whose support system doesn't exist, whose partners are actively hostile to their learning and who have to fight every inch of the way to find any space and time or the money. Barbara, I have seen working exclusively with abandoned women, single mothers, or school dropouts, young girls who had to leave school many times because they were expecting a child. So this is why I interrupted you and asked you, do they have husbands? Some of them don't. Yes, I think it doesn't make the thing easier, no more difficult, it's just a different situation that we have to cope with. And I'm so glad you are not only saying we can't change this and we shouldn't change that because you're totally right. What we have to do is we have to find the ways how the institution copes with the typical situation of a woman. And I think we also have to be quite outspoken that if in statistics women need more time to learn, it's not because they have more difficulties to understand and to cope with the program. It's because they have so much more responsibilities. We have to interpret data in a different way than we did until now, I think. And there are quite easy practical things to do if you're running a study center kind of operation to make sure that you don't have all male staff at the center or all female staff at the center, that under normal appointments procedures that you do keep in mind that there should be women counselors and there should be male counselors for the different kinds of problems that people have. And I've got one or two centers that have all male staff, which is very much on my mind and which I hope in time I can change. Well, if I may just come in because I was telling Claire to really change that as soon as possible because there are problems which women experience, which men will never be able to address. So really you've got to get women there as soon as possible because women are freer. They feel free to talk to their fellow women than men. So there is a whole lot of information being held back and this will affect their studies definitely. But I like the idea of having men and women rather than just exclusively women because there are the other areas where men are also very useful. So it's good to have a mix, yeah. Are there other aspects you would like to mention right now which makes distance education women-friendly? We had talked earlier about course materials, Gisela. And there are so many aspects to our course materials, I think that can make them either women-friendly or women hostile. The language that's used to make sure that the language is either gender-inclusive or that feminine pronouns are used as often as masculine pronouns. That the examples are drawn from women's lives, that the illustrations, as you mentioned, are as often as women as they are of men and women's situations. Not just women doing what appear to be traditionally men's jobs, but women in the situation that our women learners actually are in. And that they're written in a pedagogical fashion that is more women-friendly than our materials typically are. We have discovered at Athabasca that women enjoy learning more in collaborative ways than in competitive ways. And I don't know to what extent that's the case. In your countries as well. But women do really enjoy working together on projects, for example, having opportunities to talk to each other on a regular basis, rather than feel they're competing for more. Claire, did you want to? Yes, I was thinking about how sometimes we get it right in some topics and not in others. And in fact, this is a negative thing to do. That course materials in accounting economics and computer studies can be very male-orientated and need to be changed. But when we do the nutrition materials and the home economics, we use women, which is actually a mistake the other way. We should also make sure that our home economics, our nutrition, our teacher education materials are user-friendly to men. And I think we have to be careful both ways. Another issue, which is sort of a side issue, but not quite, we also have a problem in the developing region of materials, which are culturally inappropriate. We buy a lot of textbooks that must come from the developed world. And so on all of our students, we are having to inflict materials that are European and male. This is also not good for male students, but this is where the textbooks come from. So it's to do with gender, but it's also to do with culture. I have felt that many times discrimination of women, discrimination of races, and discrimination of class comes together. So I think when we talk about women's issues, partly we are also talking about the other two isms, the classism and the racism. So there is only what I'm bothered about is if a course is acceptable at the level of classism and racism, it may not yet be acceptable at the level of sexism or non-sexism. I would just like to give you another example from the material I was working with these women. There was a tiny little drawing where you can see in a rather big picture a tiny little grandmother sewing a dress for the doll of her little granddaughter. And then it comes from the same field of occupation. It comes to a real workshop where real work is done, where money is earned, and you find the men exclusively. Now I think we should come to conclusions. What do we have to change in distance education to make it really a tool for women to progress? Barbara, can you? One of the first things I would like to see is getting a lot more women involved at all levels of distance education institutions. I think that women are seriously underrepresented in a good many distance education systems in the same way that they are in traditional education systems as course authors, as administrators of institutions, as editors, as course support people of various kinds and especially as teaching personnel. So would that mean that the program in itself has to be aware of women's needs or can we concretize this in another way? Once you have the women, as she said, in all the various levels of education, then surely you're going to have women have an impact on the writing of materials, on the teaching of the subject. So that's what she was trying to get at, having more women on levels, teaching levels, developing of materials, designing of materials, developing of materials, distribution of materials, administration of the causes. I think it's particularly in the writing. I mean, there are a lot of women in distance education support. But at the end of the day, the teaching academic determines what goes in usually his course. And I think it's very much in the course writing that we need to get more women involved because there are a lot of women in instructional design and editing and administration. I mean, here we are. And there are many other at the ICDE conference. But we haven't got the writers. Do you think women at the level you are mentioning are sufficiently outspoken on the needs of women? Yes, I do. But you're always a minority, particularly in a university. The course writer ultimately has to say over what goes into his material. And we're talking about a worldview. You can't change a worldview by speaking up in Senate. It takes a wee bit longer than that. But I think it's the role of those of us that are in administration to run professional seminars for academic staff and to make sure that at least the issues are raised for their consideration and just to keep at it and at it and at it. But I'd like to see the women doing more of the writing as well. Exactly, because it's a skill to really have to be learned. And that's why probably we don't have many of our women doing that. So we who are in the administration, as you say, must encourage the other women to go for these seminars and courses for writing, because it's a skill. And that's why we don't have women. Well, then I understand that apart from involving more women in distance education, we have several areas from what I have read, several areas in which a course can prove to be women-friendly or hostile to women. One of the areas is the program in itself as regards access, cost, time, what we have touched before. The second is the contents, which I think Eclaire touched when she spoke about women writers. The third one would be, from my point of view, the process of teaching. We have touched that in a way because we said that women need solidarity. They want to work together. They need their experience to be used. And the teacher behavior, which I think is very important, especially if it is a male teacher who is hopefully encouraging women as well as female teachers can. And the last item, I think, is design and production of material. Would you agree with these five areas? I think they certainly cover the ground, Gisela. But I would like to underestimate the fee structure and the course schedule, the extent of the flexible course schedule. But money is a major factor, and I don't think that's just true in developing countries. Women always have a problem committing family money to pursuits that they feel are for their own individual enhancement. Let's face it, women don't have the same level of control over their finances. Even though it seems very simple, maintaining reasonable fees, keeping fees within the range of women is a vital thing to keeping their access to education. Yes, Claire. Elizabeth, any comments? Yes. That's what I'm saying. Governments must be aware of this and really give women support, you know, vote more money to go into developing such materials to support women causes, because there is no way women are going to be able to purchase this thing on the market just like the men. They've got very few resources. We have got the government of the day to give them support, to give them more money to buy the study materials, to go into the course production even. So that, to me, sounds like we also have to request more research work in the area of women friendly distance education, which is an issue for governments. I think we need to make sure that the people who are doing needs assessments for our institutions are paying attention to the needs of women equally with those of men. Too often in the business sector, for example, it's assumed that exactly the same kind of approach is going to meet the needs of women as it is of men. And we know from our experience that it's not true. I want to talk about developing regions and the role of governments in women's access to education. And in a region like the Pacific, distance education is for training more than it is for education. And our clients are the government, and they have manpower needs. And they will fund students to fill the manpower training needs that they, as a government, perceive. And that means that men get funded for education. Now, I'm saying we can't, in fact, be too critical of that, because we are not talking about individual education. Individual women, we are talking about aid-supported governments who have very serious training needs. And to say, well, you should be thinking about individual women needs. I'm saying it's a very difficult argument to put across when they have major shortages in what they see as male labor areas of the workforce, and they will not or cannot put the money into credential programs. We've got to meet it through community education or continuing education. Don't you think training is equally important to women than it is to men? I just want to tell you one example. Where I was working in that educational center, there were seven workshops to train boys. And when I asked the director of the center to open these to women, he said, I do not want a single boy to lose his opportunity for a girl. And by the end of the day, you find out that all the money that goes into the hands of the women goes into the hands of their family. This is why they are short of money because their responsibility is so large. And you cannot always be sure of this as regards men. I would very much like us to talk about international collaboration. You all know that the women's international network has been founded 10 years ago. And now, as we have a female male president, I heard her, for the first time, say, how much Wynn really gave or contributed to ICDE. It brought many, many women into distance education. Could we discuss other forms, other ideas, your ideas on international collaboration? Elizabeth, would you like to start? I think I can follow up what Claire said about the South Pacific. And I would really like to see probably ICDE or some other international organization do more research in our region, in the Africa region. I don't know of any which is going on. Do some survey, find out what the needs are, and then provide cross-cultural. Cross-cultural, yeah. And then provide funds to do that. Would you like to comment on it, Claire? When we received the funding for this research project, it was on the understanding that the methodology that has been developed will be made available to other developing regions, both the results but also the instruments themselves for use in that area. But just in terms of the sharing of materials that we know are friendly for women, I think meeting together at ICDE and through an organization like that, we are in positions to be able to make sure these materials are shared with other countries. And we all know we've got some materials that we would be proud to share because we know that they are good for women. And it can happen on a one-to-one basis. I think we are some of the agents who have to assure the international sharing of research and other results. And materials, yeah. I'd like to see us eventually move even one step beyond sharing what already exists into collaborative development. I think what's already come out of the WIN Network, for example, in terms of the book on women in distance education, is an example of how well women work together. Yes, I think it is. And to do collaborative programming, I can see that being very exciting for learners in Canada, not just women but men as well, to find out what the issues are in the South Pacific, to find out what the issues are in Africa, as well as the issues in Canada. Because I think we'd find we have so much in common. Yes, I see. That's more true than we realize in our working lives. I identify with many of the things you say, what happened in educating Rita. Happens in Canada and happens in Africa. And I tell you, I have seen this film with gentlemen from Colombia, in Colombia, and they have walked out after the first 10 minutes because she was not in tears. What they are used to see on the screen that the woman, after the first 10 minutes, is in tears because something is happening to her. She just does not want. They are not responding to this kind of person, a woman who fights for education. But the reality is that they really have to fight, and they do fight, and they just need some kind of support. Doesn't that point, Gisela, to another educated role that we have? We talk a lot about women's issues, but really what we're talking about is gender issues. Because we need to focus on the relationships between men and women, not just meeting the needs of women, because we know by meeting the needs of women, we're meeting the needs of their children, their families, their communities, their partners. And I think by being more gender inclusive in all levels of our work, we're doing a better job of meeting the needs of our men learners as well. I think this was a lovely conversation for me personally. I knew I would learn from you, but still you never know beforehand what you're going to learn and what's going to be the result. But thank you very much, Barbara, Claire, and Elisabeth. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Gisela. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.