More females needed in the labour force – Dr. Singh

In a modern society, there are still barriers to women’s access to university education as well as jobs within some sectors, such as oil and gas and agriculture.

And Minister of Finance Dr Ashni Singh on Wednesday said that Government policies and programme are crafted to ensure women are better supported.

The ultimate goal, he said, is to increase the participation of women in the labour force.

“A lot of the new jobs that are being created in the oil and gas sector, lot of the construction jobs that are being created, a lot of these jobs still attract more male applicants than female applicants.

“Of course that’s something that we want to change. We want ultimately to get rid of this notion that there are boy’s jobs and girl’s jobs. We think that has no place in the modern society”.

“We want to ensure that, as a matter of policy, that we increase female participation in the labour force. We want to create more jobs for women. We want to bring more women into the world of work and so we have deliberate policies to target,” Dr Singh said.

He made this revelation during his presentation on gender responsive budgeting at a roundtable discussion at the ministerial forum on empowerment and gender equality.

The activity forms part of the ongoing Ministerial forum on Gender Quality and Empowerment which is being held at the Marriott Hotel, Georgetown.

Apart from accessing jobs, Dr Singh said women still experience difficulties in accessing a university education than men, for various reasons.

“The reality is that there is still a large female population who for one reason or another are either unable or finding it difficult to relocated from where they are to attend the traditional universities that we have. The reality is that you have lots of people who might be a mother of young children and will therefore find it difficult to perhaps leave their children at home,” he explained.

According to Dr Singh, the government have “clear, strong and deliberately” crafted gender dimension policy framework in Guyana.

“Below the legal framework or alongside the legal framework, every single major policy document that we have developed in this government, have included and incorporated the gender dimension in a very significant way,” Dr Singh said.

This, he said, include improvement in quality of social services and job creation.

But for implementation to take place, the finance minister said there has to be budgetary resources.

“The provision of adequate budgetary resources to advance the various initiatives whether its skills training, public education, public education…to advance us towards achieving the gender objective towards which we have set ourselves”

“It’s good for the economy…greater female participation in the labour force, more skilled female population, better qualified female population in better health is good for the country,” Dr Singh said.

Dr Singh said the government is working to strengthen data systems across the entire public sector.

“Because measuring what we have and what we want to be is also critical,” he said.