g and relevant to girls and removing gender stereotyping from textbooks can also help to keep girls in school once they are there. If girls are constantly presented with stories about successful men or pictures of men in important and professional positions, while at the same time women are presented only in secondary, inferior, or mothering roles, their own ambitions and expectations may become frustrated. They also become further conditioned to accept their subordinate position. Our educational systems can produce literate housewives or articulate, innovative citizens, depending on the tools and methods which we choose to utilise.
The education and training requirements for reaching the top in some of the professions may be so inconsistent with the demands of childbearing that, unless special adaptations are introduced, women in our cultural situations will be effectively excluded, thus depriving future generations of women of role-models in those profession. I have been trying, for example, to find out how many female obstetrics and gynaecology consultants we have produced locally so far. The answer, unless I am grossly misinformed, is none. This can largely be due to the fact that the residency requirements for the specialty cannot accommodate the other social roles of women soon after graduation from medical school. And yet this is a field crying out for women specialists. An effort must be made by the appropriate authorities to work out residency schemes that harmonize more with the other needs of women.
Lawrence Summers, former Chief Economist at the World Bank, wrote "Educating girls quite possibly yields a higher rate of return than any other investment available in the developing world", giving an estimated 20 per cent return on investment18. The benefits come from a healthier population and a more productive workforce. But even educated women face further barriers laid by the serpent of discrimination as they enter the workforce. Let us now consider barriers to gender equality within the economy and the areas of reproduction and employment in particular.
We have all heard the statistics which emanated from the UN Decade for Women, that women do two thirds of the world's work yet earn less than 10 per cent of its wages, grow 50 per cent of the world's food yet own only one per cent of its land and productive resources. Women also do almost all the world's domestic work and provide more health care than all the organised health services put together - again for little or no remuneration, Yet how much do we really appreciate the value of all the work which women do?
Globally, women are overwhelmingly responsible for the work which is involved in maintaining human resources: childbearing and rearing, care of elderly and ill individuals, the growing, processing and preparation of their family's food; fuel and water collection and home maintenance. Collectively this labour is referred to as 'reproductive labour', which usually includes subsistence agriculture and the production of goods for own consumption rather than exchange. It is separated from 'productive labour' which includes all production of goods and services for sale or exchange. Public management and decision-making responsibilities are often included under productive labour, or are separated out for consideration on their own. In the gender division of labour, men are considered to be 'naturally' suited to productive and management roles, and women 'naturally' suited to reproductive tasks. While the specific content of reproductive work varies between societies, an important common feature is that it does not carry with it the entitlement to an independent income. As a result, women must undertake additional work if they need to generate an income, or they must become dependent for income transfers on those who are largely free of any responsibility for reproductive labour, namely men. Women-headed households, estimated at slightly more than 25 per cent of households in Ghana,19 may have very limited options. There is a great need to study what happens 