Where are the Women? The Lack of Female Political Leaders

News about the flocks of presidential and parliamentary aspirants fill the pages of our paper each day.

They're mostly men, of course. But nobody seems surprised.

After 50 years of independence, women are still not being taken seriously as leaders of our nation.

That's bad news for women, of course. Women's concerns—from education of female children to prevention of domestic violence or female genital mutilation—need support from leaders with a real understanding of what's at stake. And young girls will continue to have a limited sense of their own potential until they see women occupying the highest positions of government.

But the lack of female candidates is also bad news for men. One of the great benefits of democracy—theoretically, at least—is that it allows the most talented and capable people to rise to the top. Ghana's development depends on good leadership, yet truly effective leaders are rare. By ignoring women's leadership abilities, we are cutting our pool of potential leaders in half. Many young women who might have become great leaders will look at the male-dominated political ranks and decide on another path.

Many people may ask why special efforts are necessary to encourage women to run for office. Women aren't running for the presidential nomination, some might argue, because no woman wants to be president.

But that's a shortsighted view. The lack of female candidates is just another indication that politics is still a boys' game, played according to the rules that men want and geared towards their benefit.

Earlier this week, Adwoa Bame, the acting executive director of WISE Foundation, called on political parties to increase the representation of women in parliament to 30 percent by 2008 and 50 percent by 2012.

This is just the kind of ambitious goal that we must set for ourselves in order to see a real improvement in women's political participation. ADM is echoing Ms. Bame's call for a steep increase in the number of female MPs, and we urge party leaders to put every effort into achieving it.