It is another year of recognising the contribution of women and girls worldwide towards building a more sustainable future.
This year the International Women’s Day is themed ‘Gender Equality Today for a Sustainable Tomorrow’ with the hashtag #BreakTheBias.
To me, these taglines are timely as efforts are required to address gender-related challenges still experienced worldwide, such as discrimination, disparity, gender gap and Gender-Based-Violence (GBV) meted out to individuals because of their gender.
It also presents the opportunity to various jurisdictions to generally assess changes and progress made towards attaining gender equality.
Regardless of how progressive society thinks it is, many do not realise how discrimination continues to spread. Therefore, I choose today to re-echo how gender equality is a critical aspect of development, how a critical approach to bridge the persistent gap in access to opportunities that seems to leave women and girls behind is essential and how enabling women’s participation in decision-making at all levels is important.
Generally, UNICEF explains gender equality as women and men, girls and boys enjoying the same rights, resources, opportunities and protections. Bringing women and men to the state where they can actively participate in economic, political and societal spheres. Allowing for full participation in the decisions and processes that shape their lives thus adding to national development.
Gender equality is essential because development requires actors – individuals, groups, and agencies to carry out specific functions in every society. The availability of all actors makes it easy to achieve targeted goals. By way of gender equality, actors in this sense, women and men are given the necessary push or power to work hand in hand towards progress.
It is also evident that, the growth of an economy depends not only on institutions and governing affairs but, most importantly, human capital- which is people. Not giving equal access to opportunities to women just as men will remove workforce from the economy.
In addition, gender equality I believe, is one catalyst towards achieving the sustainable development goals. As Ivanova, (2021) puts it, when governments negotiated the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there was never a doubt about the role of women in promoting effective sustainable development as “equal access to education, decent work, and representation in political and economic decision-making processes form the basis for equitable societies.
Also, gender equality and empowerment of women and girls does not only implement SDG 5 but also supports progress across all 17 SDGs, including contributing to the eradication of poverty, climate mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity protection, and sustainable economic growth.”
So I am quick to say, suppose a girl is not neglected from climbing the academic ladder or not married off early because she is female, but she is pushed as the boy, or imagine if a lady is not denied work because she refuses to give herself to an employer for a job for which she qualifies, or even instances where measures at work especially salary is made favorable for both sex; then we will be sure to break the bias.
Again, I strongly believe that equality will liberate most men from false value systems and ideologies of oppression. This “we are the men” and “men don’t cry” assumptions are the exact pressures pushing them into a tight corner making them reluctant to lay off burden and accept help. These pressures have attributed to the high suicide rate among men.
For instance, the World Health Organisation’s data in 2016 shows that “nearly 40 percent of countries have more than 15 suicide deaths per 100,000 men; only 1.5 percent show a rate that high for women.”
In addition, improving the status of women by way of empowerment and equality enhances their decision-making capacity at all levels in all spheres of life, especially in the area of sexuality and reproduction. And this is essential for the long- term success of population programmes.
With focus on Ghana, the recently conducted Population and Housing Census (PHC2021), indicated that females make up 50.7 percent against 49.3percent males, representing 400,000 more females than males.
With these figures, whilst others make fun of how some women will end up not getting husbands and how men will get extra wives, I see this as a wake-up call for the country to champion efforts of gender equality where frameworks are initiated and reinforced to empower women and girls who are the major populace and are equally actors of development.
For instance, with the Global Gender Gap Index 2020, Ghana was ranked 107th country with the score of 0.673 out of 153 countries. These were also seen in the index frameworks used- economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
Curiously, I checked the top five countries which are Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Nicaragua and the reason is that they made progress towards gender parity, closed almost 88 percent of its gender gap- closing educational attainment and health and survival gaps, performance on economic participation and opportunity, top performers in terms of political empowerment- mainly thanks to long tenures of women as head of the country, significant representation of women in parliament and women who are ministers.
In Ghana, out of the 275 members of the 8th parliament, women representation is 40 thus 14.5 percent and this gap is seen in other sectors of the country. So, if the major segment of the population is least represented, how then can we break the bias?
Gender equality might not be a solution to all developmental issues, but it is a sure prerequisite. In the quest, gender mainstreaming should be made key, thus making gender an integral part in designing, implementing and monitoring the success of programmes developed or policies.
Laws should be reinforced especially the Affirmative Action Law which provides legally mandated systems, structures and policies to ensure women’s equal participation in all decision-making spaces. With some gender-related challenges picked up in schools and society, the National Commission for Civic Education’s (NCCE) role is critical.
Happy International Women’s Day!
