 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 structural adjustment, deteriorating terms of trade, and contraction of national economies. Just as girl children are the first to be pulled from school during times of economic hardship for individual families, so at a societal level are women workers the first to loose their jobs or suffer from worsening conditions of work. This has been combined with increased pressures on women's reproductive roles due to decreases in government provision of many social services under structural adjustment programmes. So while the importance of women's economic contribution to their families has continued to grow, their income-earning opportunities have been contracted. This situation is clearly not sustainable, for countries or families, and demands attention at the highest political levels. But too often those in positions of power are oblivious to the harsh realities of women's lives, and there is an absence of female decision-makers to sensitize these men and lead the movement for change.
POLITICAL REPRESENTATION AND PARTICIPATION
Women's invisibility, subordinate status and inequitable access to education are both a cause and an effect of their lack of access to decision-making positions. Although women comprise roughly 50 per cent of the world's enfranchised population, they occupy only 17 per cent of parliamentary seats worldwide, only eight per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa and three per cent in the Arab States." Currently Ghana has 16 women in a 200 member parliament, exactly the Sub-Saharan average.
Florence Abena Dolphyne points out how the gender gap in education results in a gender gap in political power. In most African countries, an ability to express oneself effectively in the language of the former colonial power, English, French or Portuguese, is a prerequisite for serious participation in Parliament or politics. She notes that the "low level of women's participation in formal education has, therefore, effectively limited the number of women who can hold responsible positions in government, or even participate meani