By Chris Uba
Life has become solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short for about 82.2 million women in Nigeria despite the avalanche of promises by the government to address the issue of gender inequality in the country, according to 2012 gender report on Nigeria by t
he World Bank and the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID).
The report, which was made available to BusinessWorld at the weekend has it that despite the fact that women have the potential to productively engage in the economic sector and reap the returns equal to those of men, they have yet to be accorded the right place in the scheme of things in the nation's socio-economic and political arena.
Gender in Nigeria Report 2012: Improving the Lives of Girls and Women in Nigeria painted a gory picture of the condition of women and girls in the country, especially in the rural areas, where they live under deplorable condition.
It said that all policies and promises to uplift the women folks in Nigeria have always ended as grandiloquence and rhetoric as things have continued to skew against women in all spheres of the nation's activities.
“Sixty-79 per cent of the rural workforce is women but men are five times more likely to own land ,” said the report.
According to the report, although women have more than 50 per cent of agricultural labour supply, men are more likely to own land. Specially, male-headed farm households own more than three times the amount of land that female-headed farm households do.
Also, according to the report, women earn less than men even within the same sectors as exemplified by a study in Osun State rural rice production which showed that women earn 60 cent per a dollar that a man earns in that sector.
“There is a 13 per cent gap between men and women in rural areas and a 30 per cent wage gap between men and women in urban areas,” said the report, which also stated that female tertiary graduates earn 20 per cent less than their male counterparts. This pattern of women earning less than men is common across all levels of productivity and profitability.
Additionally, women are crowded in the informal entrepreneurship sector where profits are lower but where more women are hired by female business owners. For instance, 14 per cent of formal entrepreneurs in manufacturing and services and 29 percent of those participating in the informal sector are women.
Also access to funds poses an immense huddle for female-owned firms in Nigeria along with other barriers to starting and expanding businesses.
According to the report, informality of women-owned businesses is also tied to lack of clarity in tax systems. Long queues and multiple visits to tax offices are disproportionately burdensome for women who are poorer and have less time to spend on such bureaucratic processes outside the home.
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