Mrs Sika Ramatu Lawson, a Project Electrical/Instrumentation Engineer at the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), has encouraged girls and young ladies not to fear to venture into the study of science and technology and its related field of work.
She said it is not impossible for the girl-child or a woman to venture into science or technology, what they had to do was to put aside fear over the perception that some classified fields or professions were only for males.
She said society needed to support females in such fields at all levels by providing them with equal opportunities to propel them to reach the top.
Mrs Lawson stated this at the eleventh monthly stakeholder engagement seminar organized by the Ghana News Agency’s Tema Regional Office, which is a platform rolled out for state and non-state actors to address national issues.
The stakeholder engagement was also used to climax the GNA Tema Regional Office’s month-long activities to mark the 2022 International Women’s Day celebration.
Speaking on the topic: “Prospects of women in the oil refinery sector: Women’s contribution to the success story of the Tema Oil Refinery,” Mrs Lawson observed that most of the females often tilt toward administration and related fields deemed as soft due to lack of support and encouragement from families, friends, peers and the society.
She said it was about time that women working in the technical outfits and holding bigger positions come together to work towards propelling the younger ones into such fields.
The TOR’s Electrical/Instrumentation Engineer encouraged girls not to give up on their dreams, saying, “anything you are good at, pursue it, it only takes a little effort to reach your dreams.”
She said women engineers like herself had broken the boundary and proved themselves in the oil refinery sector even though it was a predominately male-oriented field of work.
Mrs Matilda Adane Okrah, TOR Maintenance Planner, contributing to the discussion said the female population ratio of TOR in the past compared to the current, was encouraging, revealing that at a point in time there was only one female engineer amongst the host of men.
She said it was worthy that TOR now had several gallant ladies who were applying modern technology in various positions as technicians and engineers, chemists, and laboratory technicians, among others for the successful running of the only refinery in Ghana.
Touching on ‘breaking the bias’, which was the theme for this year’s International Women’s Day, Mrs Okrah said the COVID-19 pandemic made the world to have a feel and hear the stories of how women had been taking care of the home and still took care of their work.
“I am sure the men with the little they experienced with the kids at home during the pandemic may have changed their mindset about women,” she noted.
