Getting Ghanaian Women Empowered To Venture Into Male Dominated Professions

The research was undertaken to identify factors which are critical in encouraging and broadening the entrepreneurial focus of the Ghanaian woman. Traditionally, women have been forced to narrow their entrepreneurial pursuit because many of the jobs in the country are male-dominated. This limitation on the part of women in Ghana has restricted their job hunting and nurturing of some business opportunities. The study used a cross sectional study by using Kumasi which is one of the biggest cities in the country. A mixture of sampling technique was adopted because at some stage, some specific women were required and so purposive sampling was appropriated. At another level, a group of women was randomly selected to ensure fairness. With the help of interview sessions and questionnaire, data was obtained for eight critical explanatory variables including Age of the woman, level of education, mentoring effect, job risk, need factor of women, difficulty in task performance, preparation towards marriage and family background. A logistic model (LOGIT) was used to run a regression and it was discovered that, though 5 out of the 8 variables were significant, the combine effect of all the variables were significant at 5%. The research then concluded that, the age of the woman, embedded risk in Male Dominated Professions (MDP), level of education of the woman, the presence of mentor and the family background of the woman were critical in empowering them to take up MDP