Raising Women and Their Families Out of Poverty: Single Working Poor Mothers,
Skills Training and Online Learning
Dr. Mary Gatta
Center for Women and Work, Rutgers University
Imagine you are a high school educated single mother with two children under the
age of ten years old. You are working two jobs- 3 days you are a part-time bookkeeper at
your local church, and your weekends are spent waitressing at the diner by your
apartment. You earn about $15,000 a year, and are literally living paycheck to paycheck.
A few slow shifts at the diner in a week and you are unable to pay all your bills this
month. You know you need skills training in order to get a higher paying job, but you do
not know when you will fit classes into your day or how you will pay for them. Yet time
binds and financial cost are only some of the barriers that you face in trying to attain
workplace skills. Locating affordable and “off hours” childcare (such as on nights and
weekends when many classes are offered) often proves to be a daunting and expensive
task. In addition, you may be among the one-third of families earning $15,000 or less
who do not own a car, making the act of just getting to class a challenge. What are you to
do?
This experience is played out day after day in United States households as single
mothers negotiate work, home, and educational demands in an attempt to rise out of the
ranks of the growing working poor. For decades single working poor mothers were stuck
with traditional modes of attaining skills training, they would have to go to a class (either
at a community college or a government sponsored program site) that was neither flexible
in time nor space. Women had to juggle competing demands of home, work, and school,
Page 1 of 30 
Convention