Article Title
A review of the cultural gender norms contributing to gender inequality in Ghana: An ecological systems perspective
Abstract
While significant progress has been made in improving the wellbeing of women and girls around the world, there still exists an enormous gap between men and women in very evident in Ghana. Gender inequalities continue to persist in Ghana because of cultural gender norms that exalt and favor the male gender and puts the female in a subordinate and subservient role. These cultural gender norms hinder women’s development and widens gender inequality between men and women in different system levels of society. There is therefore the need to examine the influence of these cultural gender norms on women’s lives at the different system levels using a framework to get a full picture of women’s experiences at these system levels of society. In this paper, we use Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems approach as a multilevel approach to examine the impact of these cultural gender norms on women’s lives at the different system levels. We conducted a desk review of studies published in sub-Saharan Africa focused on cultural gender norms and gender inequality. The Findings showed that the impact of cultural gender norms on gender inequality at the four social systems (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem levels) are interconnected, creating and widening the inequality gap between men and women. Cultural gender norms influence gender role socialization in the home, which then transmits to the school and religious institutions as the mesosystem. Cultural gender norms at the school as a mesosystem, manifests through discriminatory classroom practices, gender role assignment of school responsibilities, and gender role representations in textbooks. In Christianity and Islam, cultural gender norms create doctrines that enforces male domination over women and, in the workplace cultural gender norms have gendered labor, defining a man’s occupation and limiting women’s occupation to domestic and low-paying occupations. The mass media is the exosystem that, that displays images of women to fit cultural gender norms of what is defined as being acceptable for women. Finally, the macrosystem is the overall sociocultural norms that have been accepted by society that perpetuate discriminatory practices against women.