Worth a wage : labour force re-entry programs and women's self-esteem

This study was conducted during the spring of 1993 with the intent of further investigating women's experience in a labour force re-entry program, related to research I had conducted several years earlier. Informed by existing research on women in the labour force and more specifically in labour force re-entry programs, I found myself forming a series of questions which resulted in the following study. Twenty women, recent graduates of "Waged Women", a federal government-funded labour force re-entry program for women, were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide. The women were asked about their experiences of the re-entry program, why they enrolled in the program, what benefits they received from it, and other related questions. Following feminist guidelines for theory and methodology, an exploratory research design was undertaken and the data are qualitative in nature. This study informs us that women often require re-entry programs when they are ready to seek paid labour after staying at home caring for children and/or working for pay on a part-time basis. At this point in their lives they need not only a job, but a boost in their self-esteem and confidence in their ability to work for pay. Without the programs, women feel unable to seek and secure gainful employment partly as a result of the low self-esteem they develop as a direct and indirect result of being absent from the paid labour force for an extended period of time. In addition to the various structural barriers to their success in the paid labour force (occupational segregation, low pay and benefits, for example), women face personal and societal expectations of their roles in the home and in the labour force which tend to diminish the value of their labour and confuse or deny their own desires and directions. Labour force re-entry programs for women go some way toward increasing women's self-esteem and confidence in their working abilities which can help them to seek and secure a paying job.