EASE OF BUSINESS AND LOCKING OUT WOMEN

Discrimination against women makes the economy less competitive, argues Joshua J. Omojuwa  

Abimbola sees herself first as a Nigerian before being an American, even though she was born and raised in California. For many years, she always desired to live and work in Lagos. At the age of 30, she eventually got her big opportunity when the organization she worked with decided to second her to Nigeria. She had visited Nigeria several times before but this time, she was coming to live in Nigeria. This showed her a new side to her beloved country.

The less said about her experience at the airport, the better. I have written enough about that experience, it serves no purpose here to belabour that point here.

Abimbola needed a place to stay, so she went in search of an apartment. Her effort to get a place proved futile because house owners wouldn’t rent their houses to a single lady. They asked her to bring her husband before they could rent her their apartments. When she got tired, she arranged with her male cousin who was out of job at the time. Instead of Abimbola, the cousin engaged house owners like he was the one renting and Abimbola was the sister. It worked quickly, the jobless man got the wealthy woman the apartment she had toiled and worked to get to no avail.

It was a lesson on the reality of being a woman in Nigeria. And however tough this might have been for her; Lagos is more advanced on this cause than elsewhere in Nigeria.

In a country where 98 per cent of the population have less than $500 in their account — based on the current exchange rate — imagine the anomaly of refusing someone with the resources to pay for a service on account of their gender?

There are variations of this foolishness across every layer of our economic system. They compound to leave us as an economy that whilst desperate for every value it can get, does its best to maltreat a lot of the source of that value, for nothing other than this unwholesome culture of treating women like afterthoughts and second-class human-beings. We are costing them as a gender, just as much as we are costing ourselves as a people and as an economic system.

If you were not a Nigerian woman, knowing what you know and all that you’ve experienced as a woman in Nigeria, would you want to come work in Nigeria? Please put this question to a woman close to you. I’d love to know the answers even though I have an idea what most of them are.

Every other person reading this piece knows a woman with a similar story. Our economic system assumes that the inclusion of women in the economy is a favour to the gender when in the real sense, doing otherwise makes our economy less competitive and not conducive even for our own people who are used to this culture, let alone those women who’d have no mental bandwidth to deal with what they would understandably regard as a form of irrationality at best, or in truth, madness.

Like Maurice Obstfeld, the former IMF Economic Counsellor, put it, “Gender equality is more than a moral issue; it is a vital economic issue. For the global economy to reach its potential, we need to create conditions in which all women can reach their potential.”. More so here, for the Nigerian economy.

A female boss goes for lunch with her male subordinates, after the meal, the waiter automatically hands the bill to one of the men. The aggregate of this behaviour is what you’d see at hotel check-ins and lobbies, places of work where the host immediately assumes the man led the lady in – like a scene in Olivia Pope where the prospective client immediately assumed the white woman, a staff of Olivia Pope, had to be the Olivia Pope. Because society shapes our biases. In the case of this client, the boss had to be the White woman and not the Black woman. That is a short but powerful scene in that series that reflects how a prevailing culture of discrimination against a group can blind us even in our daily dealings in the workplace.

In our case, the way we treat women is that blindness. It is so normal; we actually do not see it until pointed out. However, once you see it, you start seeing a lot of it.

As a man, however concerned you are about your safety, just think of the fact that the mere act of having male artisans at home is cause for a woman to fear for her safety. They’d have to put measures in place including staying on the phone with a male character or pretending to and ensuring that the artisan knows that they aren’t alone. They also find a way to ensure quick and easy access to a door. Whilst this bit is not unique to Nigeria, we have read and heard way too many stories about this to not commit to ensuring safety for our women in situations that men are not generally bothered about their safety.

When reading up on the indicators on Ease of Doing Business, I found it interesting that none of the sources, including the World Bank and ChatGPT, mentioned the gendered nature of doing business even though this is a global phenomenon. Ours is an economy that needs to do everything it possibly can to put every resource available to it to use. Of the resources that we appear to either be limiting or completely shutting out, women are the most essential.

Statistically for starters, that’s about half of your potential workforce. By design, that undermines your competitiveness in a way you cannot begin to imagine. It’s like trying to run with one leg.

So, where do we start with correcting this anomaly that is obviously the norm? A good place to start would be to acknowledge our shortcomings. Once we do that, we’d have started the journey towards making our country a place where women want to come work. First, we must start with our women.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/author, Digital Wealth Book