Africa embracing its women

earn an average of 75 percent of the pay of males for the same work, outside of the agriculture sector, in both developing and developed countries. Women also work approximately twice the unpaid time that men do. Worldwide estimates suggest that the value of women’s unpaid housework and community work is between 10-35 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a contribution not captured in national accounts.  
A series of UN-sponsored international conferences have highlighted the need to promote more equity and equality for the world’s women. There is also the UN resolution requiring 30 percent women’s participation in all societies’ endeavours as a means of compensating for women’s historical and social disadvantages.
As a result of these concerted efforts, changes are taking place — in constitutions, statutes and policies at national, regional and international levels — aimed at altering the status quo to ensure that women are equivalent to men in terms of rights, responsibilities and opportunities. As the barriers fall, the number of women in the public sector continues to increase, as is the case for elected office. Women in politics and women in business executive positions continue to rank high as the world’s most powerful and influential.
Women now hold 20 percent of the seats in the world’s parliaments. Rwanda, at 56 percent, has the highest representation worldwide. There are currently 20 female heads of state, the highest in history. Although disappointingly low, seven percent of Cabinet members are women. Fortune Magazine’s latest ranking of America’s 500 largest corporations includes more women CEOs than ever before. Women lead 18 of those 500 companies including, within the last year, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. There are an additional 21 female CEOs in the Fortune 501-1000, some of them managing steel, oil and energy companies.
The data from emerging economies have shown that social and economic empowerment of women can yield huge development results. Thus, recent efforts worldwide have focused on the need to empower more women to participate fully in economic life across all sectors and throughout all levels of economic activity.
This has led to programs and interventions aimed at promoting more women in the private sector and in ownership of business entities. From June 2009 to March 2011, Women, business and the law recorded 461 legal and regulatory changes occurring in 39 economies that affected the indicators of women.
Forty-one of these changes were aimed at achieving greater gender parity and reducing legal differentiation between men and women. Results are beginning to show in many developing countries. Almost 40 percent of entrepreneurs running small or medium-sized businesses are women and in key sectors, such as textiles and agricultural commodities, the female share of employment could be as high as 80 percent.
Despite the progress, challenges do remain. In many places, women are prevented from achieving their full potential simply because they are women. It is more difficult for women to gain access to finance for their businesses. On average, only 5-10 percent of women-owned entities have access to commercial bank loans and only 3 percent of venture capital investments globally.
Lack of access to land and inheritance rights limits women’s access to credit. Moreover, in many developing countries, the lack of data generally and disaggregated data in particular, constrains efforts to formulate policies and design appropriate interventions to expand the level of women in business.
According to UN data, in Africa women account for 70 percent of the agriculture work force, producing the same percentage of the continent’s food. 
Johnson Sirleaf is president of Liberia and Africa’s first female head of state.