The Convention People’s Party (CPP) has challenged women to take up roles in male-dominated professions to break the barriers and make an impact in those fields of endeavour.
It encouraged women to acquire professional knowledge and skills through formal academic pursuits or informal apprenticeships but must not be satisfied with any position and must dare to climb upwards.
“We cannot simply continue an outdated conversation for women’s equality, rate of change is not fast enough for heightened expectations around equality, despite best intentions of gender advocates, structures continue to emerge to fight against interest of women,” the party lamented.
Nana Akosua Sarpong-Kumankuma, the Chairperson of CPP, who threw the challenge at the 11th monthly stakeholder seminar organised by the Ghana News Agency to address national issues, said women ought to organise themselves properly as they acquired knowledge and skills in various fields, especially the technology field.
Speaking on the topic: ‘The Path of Women Entrepreneurs-Challenges and Prospects’, she noted that even though voices for women’s equality, advancement, and advocacy continued to gain momentum, they were not making required impact and women needed to catalyse the change through impactful engagement at top level.
“From political, economic, governance, social, religious, and other fields, the national and grassroots movements have only created dialogue and sparked conversation around gender parity, we have not yet fuelled enough fire to evolve thinking through to challenge women to venture into maledominated professions.
“If we are to challenge the status quo and impact change, we must consider how our biases, conscious or unconscious, are affecting our daily conversations and practices -the biases include tendency to associate with people who remind us of searching for information to confirm our own perceptions and firmly held beliefs.
“These actions maintain the status quo within organisations which do not challenge established norms that may be excluding underrepresented people in organisations, so we need to dig deeper to explore our differences to challenge the status quo which can transcend practical applications, such as recruiting strategies, hiring practices, or promotion criteria, towards self-reflect,” Nana Sarpong-Kumankuma stressed.
Florence Essel, Assistant General Manager in Charge of Administration, Ghana Ports and Harbour Authority (GPHA), speaking on the topic: ‘Prospects of women in the blue economy – Women’s contribution to the GPHA’s 60 years of operation’, said some of the machines and other operational mechanisms made it virtually impossible for females to enter those fields in the past but now the situation was changing because 16 per cent of entire staff at GPHA were females.
Francis Ameyibor, Tema Regional Manager, Ghana News Agency, in his remarks, stated that technology had virtually balanced the workspace due to works in the past demanded physical manpower had changed as machines are now being used to manage them which made it flexible for females to also operate machines. -GNA