Former Minister for Gender, Children and Social protection, Nana Oye Lithur has expressed worry over Ghana’s inability to produce enough female scientists.
She was speaking at Zenith University College in Accra, as part of the celebration of International Women’s Day, organized by Africa Business Centre for Developing Education (ABCDE) on the theme, “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality.”
According to her, seventy-five percent of jobs in the world by 2050, will be related to science, technology and mathematics and hence the need to get more women into that field.
“Looking into the future, what data and research tell us is that seventy-five percent of jobs by year 2050, will be related to the science, technology and mathematics and as we speak now, we have only twenty-two percent of positions being held by women in the artificial intelligence field, this 2018 data,” she said.
“In terms of Ghana, we can see the gender disparity that in Ghana, when you rank the top 3000 scientists, only 285 of them, that is, 9.5% of them are females. Why is this so,” she asked.
She blamed the under-representation on having few female students studying science in our senior high and tertiary schools.
“We can trace this back to the number of girls who take science, who take mathematics in our senior high schools and in our tertiary institutions.
“We have had very few girls excel in our national science and match quiz, and this is indicative of our situation as far as innovation, as far as science and as far as technology is involved.”
