Hammering Their Way through the Barriers: Low-Income Women Retrain to Be Carpenters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Every workday for Wve years low-income women picked up their hammers and began to build a new life for themselves as they participated in the Women's Work Training Program in Regina, Saskatchewan.This was a unique retraining program that was the brainchild of Valerie Overend and Denise Needham, two women who had become carpenters in order to become self-sufWcient.Valerie, a single mother, has an extensive background in community development and is an inXuential member of the national organization Women in Trades and Technology.Denise created her own carpentry company in Regina and received the YWCA Women of Distinction Award for her business acumen.Together these two women fully understood the need to provide nontraditional skills training within a womenonly environment that would be free from harassment.They appreciated the need to establish a long-term program that would include a life skills component.They understood that women required Xexibility in order to juggle their retraining program with their heavy domestic demands.The program was unique in a number of important ways.Established in 1995, it was intensive, being Wve years in length.Rarely do retraining programs for low-income women extend beyond six to twelve months.Women were expected to be in the retraining program Wve days a week for Wve years.Women who were underemployed or without paid work, Saskatchewan residents, had Grade 10 math, and were physically able were eligible to apply to the program.Sixty-four women were accepted over a three-year period.Almost three-quarters of the women were on welfare and 20 percent were on Employment Insurance (EI) when they began the program.Initially, the women received an income from one of these two funding sources.However, after the Wrst year of the program the Regina Women's Construction Co-operative was formed and women could apply to become members.If accepted women received a co-op wage based on seniority and job performance.The co-op was a unique experiment that permitted its members to continue their training with some Wnancial
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".