All across the world, there is a direct correlation between female empowerment and economic development. To put it succinctly, companies and societies are more likely to grow and prosper when women gain greater financial independence as wage earners and property owners.

When women participate in the economy, everyone benefits. – Hillary Clinton

When an important asset isn’t utilized in a business, the business loses it’s competitive edge and eventually revenues go down. This principle works even with national economies which operate on a larger scale than most businesses. And, it leads to the question: Why do we allow the massive, yet avoidable waste of human capital, because of gender bias? This is something that should be addressed all across Africa and globally even.

There are only fifty per cent of women in paid employment in comparison to seventy-seven per cent of men in sectors comprising everything other than agriculture. This disparity in employment rates has scarcely reduced over the last two decades. To make matters worse, the gap increases the more one advances up the career ladder. There has been a decline in the number of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies from twenty five per cent to below five per cent in more recent times. This is depressing news indeed.

I went to a women’s only college for my undergraduate studies in New York – Fordham University’s Marymount College, in the nineties. It was a superb education that I received there. There was a focus on boosting the mindsets of the young ladies admitted there, to realising that they had what it took to be achievers, who could make a difference in the world. Distinguished female CEOs regularly came there to speak to us, and internships to increase the number of females in blue chip companies were constantly availed us. We were given the freedom to think and act. It was when I went to graduate school in Syracuse University to study Chemical Engineering that I realized what a blessing it had been to attend that college.

How do we bridge this gender disparity gap? First, we need men to join women in changing the status quo. Most of the advocacy in this regard is led by women and it seems unerringly similar to the charge for the right of women to vote in the 19th and 20th centuries. Men have mothers, sisters, aunties, and daughters, and they should understand that whatever happens to these women is their responsibility also. As such, men need to step up to the cause!

It has been calculated by economic think tanks that terminating the gender gap would add $28 trillion to the value of the global economy – a 26 per cent increase – by 2025. To truly depict the enormity of this addition, the surge would be equal to the combined GDPs of the U.S. and China.

Second, CEOs and titans of industry should comprehend that gender bias goes beyond being a civil and human rights issue, it also has to do with potentials for the cash flow of a business. It comprises the single major distortion in the contemporary labour market and it is a foremost obstruction to wealth creation. It thwarts talent from rising to its natural level and leads to the methodical misallocation of funds, leaving the global economy worse off in the process.

It has been calculated by economic think tanks that terminating the gender gap would add $28 trillion to the value of the global economy – a 26 per cent increase – by 2025. To truly depict the enormity of this addition, the surge would be equal to the combined GDPs of the U.S. and China.

All across the world, there is a direct correlation between female empowerment and economic development. To put it succinctly, companies and societies are more likely to grow and prosper when women gain greater financial independence as wage earners and property owners.

…in the long term, the useful strategy would be to increase opportunities for women to build and develop companies of their own. Emphasizing women’s entrepreneurship will lead more to a narrowing of the gender gap, than promotion within existing businesses.

Third, so far the focus has been on enabling women to break the glass ceiling in corporations dominated by men. This has it’s place in the long scheme of things, however in the long term, the useful strategy would be to increase opportunities for women to build and develop companies of their own. Emphasising women’s entrepreneurship will lead more to a narrowing of the gender gap, than promotion within existing businesses.

The sad reality today is that there are more male entrepreneurs than female ones. Women entrepreneurs receive an unreasonably small amount of venture funding, despite the existing data that shows that companies founded by women produce considerably higher returns than the market average. We must enable more women gain access to the investment capital needed to support and accelerate the evolving revolution in female entrepreneurship.

Over three decades ago, Nobel Prize winner, Professor Muhammed Yunus fashioned the first ever microcredit bank in Bangladesh. He observed that women were more likely than men to run their businesses professionally and to reimburse loans. His microfinance bank, Grameen has 90 per cent of its customers as women. Gender bias shouldn’t be our undoing as a society and we should all work hard at really transforming how we do business and raise and support women entrepreneurs.