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The Member of Parliament (MP) for Agotime-Ziope Constituency, Mrs Juliana Azumah Mensah, has expressed the frustrations and stress women MPs in Ghana�s legislature go through daily because of their small number. Mrs Juliana Azumah Mensah, who is also the Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Gender, said the 10 per cent women parliamentarians in the country was worrisome,and that the situation needed immediate redress to encourage more women to contest for leadership positions to help in the development of the country. Mrs Azumah Mensah, who is a former Minister for Women and Children�s Affairs, spoke with the Daily Graphic after contributing to a discourse on a national forum on women organised by the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre in Accra under a Women in Leadership Project supported by The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Speaking on some of the challenges they faced, she said, �First of all our numbers are small � 30 to 275, and when you are talking it�s not every issue that dwells on gender, so you find that the majority of issues are male-based. Now as a woman, even before you get up to talk, you must know what you are about to talk about unlike the men who can just get up and say anything.� Low appreciation According to Mrs Juliana Mensah, if the women MPs made contributions deemed to have little substance, they were seen not as bright as their male counterparts. She, however, opined that if their number was large they would be taken more seriously. �Women are doing a lot to help Ghanaian women, but at the moment, we are under a lot of stress to fight hard to come into power. People are not recognising our efforts, but they overlook the situation that we are also fighting hard to keep our families. Our marriages are on the rocks. We face issues with family, work and our constituencies,� she said. Hon. Juliana Mensah listed some bills the women MPs had immensely contributed to, some of which had been passed into laws with others yet to be enacted as the Affirmative Action Bill, the Domestic Violence Bill, the Human Trafficking Act as well as the Property Rights of Spouses Bill. She urged for more collaboration with male MPs who were gender sensitive to talk about issues concerning women. �There are a lot we can do to bridge the gap between the MPs and the women out there who champion the course of women empowerment,� she said. Leadership roles in political parties Mrs Azumah Mensah said the major cause of low participation of women in politics was because political parties had put in place structures unfriendly to women. �Political parties haven�t been democratic institutions. The positions of Chairman, General Secretary have always been male dominated,� she said, urging the media to take on political parties to give women the chance to also win more parliamentary seats. She also urged women to be very active in their communities and constituencies so that they could easily stand and be counted during elections. Addressing participants in the forum, the Mobilisation Manager for Abantu, Mrs Hamida Harrison, said it was important to appoint women into various leadership positions in Parliament to help build a common agenda to see to the development of the country. �Apart from Samia Nkrumah, women are not accorded the chance to be leaders of political parties. The people who work for political parties to win elections are mostly women. There is, therefore, the need to engage political parties to open space for women to exhibit their talents and creativity to run the affairs in Parliament,� she said. According to her, there had been great difficulty for women to break the channel of monopoly created by men in the political arena, adding �Women have equal abilities to take up roles in Parliament, but their efforts to contest and win seats had been daunted by prejudice and stereotyping against the female gender.� �Women are mostly challenged by cultural norms and religious forces, and not that they do not have the intelligence to take up leadership positions,� she said. Contributing to discussions, Ms Nacente Seabury, FIDA-Ghana, said structural inequality is the result of a male- dominated society and that certain perceptions about women must change. Mrs Elizabeth Apkalu, Executive Director, Advocates for Gender Equity, said, �Unless we change the structure of politics nothing is going to change.� She said women were worse off after the Beijing Conference and that corruption and flagrant abuse of money during elections, which she referred to as �monecracy� was inhibiting the participation of women.