The Member of Parliament (MP) for Klottey-Korle in the Greater Accra Region,Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, has urgedleadership of political parties to realign their structures to encourage more women into parliament in ensuring quota for females is actually fulfilled.

“We are facing challenges and it is not enough to constantly look at parliament and say it is difficult, it has never been easy being a woman in any leadership position and the primaries that preceded Election 2020, female MPs who were contested by their male counterparts some of them lost,” she bemoaned.

According to her, Parliament could not be blamed for not having enough women in the House, instead the blame should be put squarely at doorsteps of political parties since they were not given enough chance to move at various levels with structuresof the party.

Dr Agyeman-Rawlings noted that there were no opportunity for females to rise to hold other enviable positions in the parties but become chairpersons, among others and observed that the system had been rigged towards males and pushed against women because it was not womenfriendly.

She indicated that when issues were raised about encouraging more women to take up enviable positions, they were discouragedby their male counterparts however, countries where more women in government in various position within political parties there were positive transformation in society.

“It is about time we take practical steps to actualise the call for pushing women in leadership positions and stop lip services, we need to have honest convention on this so as having more women in leadership is not undermining the men, rather complementing, assisting and supporting men and women working together to bring different perspectives of offering solutions to problems and challenges,” Dr Agyeman-Rawlings stressed.

She lamented that there were also funding gap for women trying to venture into politics as they were not likely to get financial support and assistance from people towards their campaigns and less likely to win their elections after taking risks which did not favour females.

Dr Agyeman-Rawlings pointed out that there were violence,abuse and denigration against women in politics before and during electionsand reason lots of qualified women would still not want to put themselves up to take up challenges or leadership roles.