mination in employment, including their concentration into low levels and low status positions, unequal pay for the same work as male counterparts, and sexual harassment at the workplace. A range of values, both economic and non-economic, appear to govern discrimination against women in employment. In many societies, in both the industrialized and developing worlds, women's income is viewed as secondary and supplementary to that of the main male breadwinner and household head, hence lower wages for women arc seen to be justified. Cost considerations stemming from labour legislation about women, such as the provision of maternity leave, are also used as justification for lower pay.
Many employers distrust women's commitment to continuing employment and fear intermittent absence by women employees who must meet the needs of their families. And there is little doubt that some employers discriminate against women in pay and working conditions largely because they feel they can get away with it: women workers are perceived as passive, are often unorganized and lack political visibility and clout.
In her book The Emancipation of Women: An African Perspective, the former chairperson of the National Council on Women and Development in Ghana, Florence Abena Dolphyne, notes that professional women - lawyers, doctors, engineers, bankers, administrators and the like - command a great deal of respect in African societies. Discussing women's status in formal employment, she notes:
"Professional women in Africa do not face the same level of discrimination in employment that women in similar positions have had to put up with in some Western countries... they earn the same salaries and enjoy the same conditions of service as their male counterparts... The discrimination that the professional African woman has to put up with is more within the home environment, where traditional attitudes about a woman's place in the home still persist."
In Ghana, women workers have been fortunate to encounter proportionately little discrimination in employment. Ghana ratified the ILO's Convention on Equal Remuneration for Men and Women Workers for Work of Equal Value in 1951, and government employees of the same rank receive the same pay regardless of sex. However, an employer's compliance with other legislation concerning female workers, such as maternity and child-care provisions, is often harder to monitor. For example, in a different country there was a law requiring all businesses with 30 or more female employees to provide child-care facilities. Instead of disobeying the law, many businesses found a way to limit their female staff to 29. Such subtle forms of discrimination can also be found in Ghana.
Women are estimated to make up nearly 70 per cent of the workforce in clerical, sales and service positions in Ghana, and roughly 35 per cent of workers in production, transport or labourer classifications. At the professional and administrative levels, however, women make up only 23 per cent of workers.35 Within some professions, gender representation becomes even more skewed. Out of 523 professional staff in the University of Ghana in 1993, 92 were women. Of 74 professors only six were women. Out of 98 staff of the University of Ghana Medical School 19 were women and the one female professor out of nine is non-Ghanaian. Similar differences exist within the ranks of the judiciary: one out of 11 judges on the Supreme Court, and one out of eight at the Court of Appeal are women. These gaps can be directly traced to the gender gap in education: at the third level of education, only nine per cent of engineering, agriculture and natural science students were women, and only one quarter of medical science students. Out of 23 lawyers called to the bar recently, only five were females. We can continue to provide such depressing statistics, but why continue? The precarious economic environment which has prevailed in the world over the last decade or more has adversely affected many developing countries, but the African region has been hardest hit through struc