Volume 4, Issue 2, 1999
Table of Contents

Chinese Industrial Painters "Brushed Up" on Technique and Gender Equity at SAIT

by Jessica Albers 

"Women hold up half the sky" is a popular slogan in China. It emerged from the Chinese cultural revolution of 1949, as women started to take a more active role in the country’s economic, political and social decision-making process. Today, this watchword also "resonates" with the principles of the Women in Development and Gender Equity Policy that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) applies to its development programs in China and around the world.

To truly hold up half of the sky in today’s world, women need to be as integrally involved in the technology of today’s workplace as their male colleagues. Through the CIDA-funded Canadian College Partnership Program, a 1995-1999 Canada-China Industrial Coatings Applicators Training Project addressed an area of technology not normally associated with women but nevertheless included a gender and technology component. Delivered by the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) in Calgary, Alberta in partnership with Changzhou Industrial Technology College and Nanjing Polytechnic College in Jiangsu Province, PRC, the four-year fellowship project provided "train-the-trainer" and customized courses for 37 Chinese education and industry representatives, who would in turn train approximately 100 workers in China. While learning the techniques of applying corrosion-inhibiting coatings to oil and gas pipelines, valves and fittings, major storage vessels, rail cars, bridges and other structures, the fellows participated in a two-day gender equity workshop with related industry visits as part of the second year’s curriculum.

A "Gender and Technology Training" module, custom designed and translated into Chinese, served as the primary tool for the workshop. The module focussed on specific learning outcomes such as "[recognizing] the concerns and contributions of having a classroom with students of both genders," "[identifying] the expectations held about women in various education and career roles" and "[becoming] familiar with programs and policies that promote equity in the classroom. It also reinforced enabling objectives such as "[describing] the responsibilities of instructors for managing the classroom in a way that includes all students", "[describing] skills and strategies for handling behavior that interferes with effective teaching and learning practices in an equitable classroom," and "[developing] a strategy to be implemented and evaluated regarding [the participant’s] use of equitable teaching practices."

Feedback from the workshop provided interesting insight into the perceptions of the Chinese instructors and how gender equity is addressed in China. One participant commented that in the urban areas "women enjoy the same jobs, the same salaries and the same status [as men]." She also wrote that at her institute, women constitute 60 percent of the staff, 50 percent of whom are middle managers, faculty deans and some are higher-level executives. A male participant commented on the importance of education and the teacher in the development and implementation of gender equity principles, "because instructors are the ones who have an impact on the next generation, and they are the engineers of human souls." One of his colleagues also felt that the "many problems about issues of women have been solved [in China]", but "because of tradition, the gender equality problem has not been fully resolved in Canada."

SAIT project coordinator Marlene Law was involved with the training project since its inception and concurs that this feedback from the participants "was a true confirmation of [her] observations and good experiences as a female project coordinator working in China." "I was especially pleased with their understanding and open discussions of how significantly the status of women has improved since the cultural revolution and their sincere commitment as educators to develop personal action plans for implementation when they returned to their classrooms in China," she says. These action plans included increased access to institutional resources and benefits through the appointment of two female project coordinators, one female technical instructor for curriculum revision and two female technical instructors for "train-the-trainer" instruction.

Although the gender distribution of the participants in this technical training project hardly represented the "half" in "Women hold up half the sky" (seven of the 37 trainers in the project were women), "this [was] a favorable mix of gender representation" said Ms. Law, "since female workers have not generally been well represented in the coatings industry in China and this inequity of gender is typical of the North American coatings industry as well. It is primarily due to the infancy of the industry rather than the result of institutionalized gender treatment."