All over the world, the fight is on to give women the right to earn equal pay for equal work. The concept is that if a man will do a certain work and earn an amount, if a woman can do the same work, she should also be paid a similar amount. This makes perfect sense since it is the same effort that is required and expended.
Earlier, the fight was on women being represented in the workforce of a country as much as their male counterparts. When one studies the statistics and finds that the number of women in a country is close to or equal that of men; or, as the case is in many instances, that the women are more than the men, then there is no reason why the representation of women should be lower than that of men.
The truth is that, for the development of a nation to be fast-tracked, all barriers must be removed. The gender barrier, tribal, race, religious and all other forms of divisions should be completely eradicated. The people of the country must see each other as compatriots first and foremost. After that, other considerations can come in if they have to because in many cases, they don’t need to surface at all. This is more reasonable because citizenship does not know gender.
March being the month in which International Day of the Woman is celebrated annually, it is important that focus is beamed on their plight and see how the problems that they – and by extension we (the nation) – encounter and seek to redress them all together, altogether.
From this angle, it is important to create and increase the awareness of women issues in the country. The democratization process will be sluggish without the full recognition and participation of our womenfolk.
