With women, we flatter to deceive

It is a subject that I agonise over a lot of the time and when March 8, International Women’s Day comes along then I agonise over it even more. Why are Ghanaian women among the poorest of the poor when I hear so much about them being dynamic and hard-working?

I have heard it said that there is no women’s problem in Ghana. It is a question that some think should not even arise. 

This is the country, after all, that had a female High Court judge before the United Kingdom had one and where there is a female Chief Justice and nobody thinks there is any reason to make a fuss about it.  A cynic might say this is the country, after all, that when some people decided to abduct and kill judges to spread fear among the population, the judges included a female; the fact that she was a nursing mother did not inhibit them, if proof were needed that women are treated equally in our society. 

This is the country, after all, where among the biggest ethnic group; you can’t become a chief without the say-so of the Queenmother. Women, we are asked to believe, are powerful in Ghanaian society. 

The truth, however, is that when it comes to the status of women in our society, I am afraid we flatter to deceive in Ghana. We are all headline and no meaningful context. 

In individual relationships

It is worthwhile to start with our individual relationships because that is probably the area of the best test for how females are perceived in our society. I wonder how many Ghanaian men would consider the possibility that their women/wives/female partners could be more intelligent than they were. 

I am not recommending that Ghanaian women are more intelligent than their menfolk, but I am suggesting that the distribution of intelligence by nature in our country is not done with a bias towards the male sex but tends to be like all other things in nature, rather equal at the end.

Thus, I have to wonder why things are so skewed when it comes to the distribution of jobs and leadership positions in particular.

It is true that when schools first started in our country, there was a definite bias towards sending boys to school. For the past 40 years a concerted effort has been made to encourage the education of the girl-child; indeed, so much so some people even think the boys now need special treatment because they are now being left behind. We are gradually getting as many girls into school as the boys and their performance is generally as good.  

 For seven years I attended a lot of university graduation ceremonies in this country, which came with the job I was doing. I noticed, and this can be checked out with the records, that most of the prizes in the graduating classes in law and medical school were won by the girls. There was a year when a female won all 10 prizes in the graduating law class. During the time that I was attending these ceremonies, females got the majority of prizes in the graduating medical school class. 

And so I look at the legal and medical professions 10 years and more down the line and I can hardly see any females making waves. The females do seem to be showing up in the judiciary, but where are the females with prosperous legal firms and where are the female lawyers making waves at the Bar? Where are the prize-winning female doctors, years down the line from graduation, who are making waves and where are their practices and are they making money?

In economy 

Take the role of women in the economy for example. The popular wisdom seems to be Ghanaian women are very much integrated in the economy and are in the forefront of economic activity. They rule the markets, they sell everything and anything. They are in charge of the distribution of foodstuff from the farms to the markets. In most other economies, the people in charge of the food distribution chain tend to be the ones that make the money. In our case, the women are the farmers, they are in charge of the distribution and they are the sellers and yet they still constitute the majority of the poorest of the poor.   

Take the role of women in the churches for example. There are more women in every church in this country than there are men; sometimes the ratio is about three females to one male. But the leadership of the churches is dominated by men and what is more, the men purport to make rules about how women should comport themselves in church and other related matters. The women accept this without any questioning and, indeed, when it comes to oppressive rules about how women should dress in the choir, for example, it is women who are drafted to keep women in line.

In politics 

Take the role of women in our politics, for example; why are there so few women in Parliament and other political positions? I recall my own doomed attempt to try to get into Parliament on the ticket of a political party that had five per cent of the votes in the preceding elections in the constituency where I stood. The stump speech of my main opponent, who was male, was his unfounded claim that I was unmarried and childless.

Therein lies the problem that is dragging half the population and, thereby, our entire nation backwards. If you are to make a success of a law practice, you must be prepared to be in your chambers when people have closed from work, you cannot be on a 9-5 schedule. If you are going to be noticed in the bank or the newsroom or Ministry of Finance, then you must be ready to stay on beyond normal hours to finish off some awkward work; and those who are married and have children cannot stay on. 

My female prize-winning professionals end up in jobs that allow them to bring up the next generation of Ghanaians but miss out on achieving their potential. Half our population is missing out and Ghana is the loser.