Lack of supportive laws and career policies, absence of female mentors for fellow women and having to juggle a lot of other responsibilities beyond work are among the factors hampering career growth for women in Kenya.
Research on applying the intersectionality lens in population and health research has found that women's career pathways take a different tangent from males due to underlying issues that are hardly captured in their career world.
“Women have to deal with societal pressures such as caregiving, and motherhood, and most of these roles call for the woman to take time off from their formal work in order to attend to them,” explained Dr Silvia Muyingo, associate research scientist at Africa Population and Health Research Center.
The study also found that existing policies are mostly not supportive of women who are focused on rising to leadership positions.
Other factors are women’s disadvantage when it comes to networking opportunities, career-advancing workshops and training.
This meant that fewer women are involved in working groups and other positions that could progress to leadership, and forums where issues such as allocation of resources to the nation are discussed.
“Even when women ascend to positions of leadership, there are few or no female role models or mentors for them to learn from. This makes it tougher for them to fit into the leadership roles compared to their male counterparts who have more men to learn from,” she added.
The human resource policies in the health sector were also found to be not supportive in that they do not capture the societal norms such as the extra roles a woman is expected to carry out, such as caregiving.
The policies available, the research found, do not address issues such as unpaid care, the time that a woman has to be away on parental duties and other societal expectations.
These gaps make it harder for women to receive the necessary support to rise the career ladder in healthcare, according to the findings of the research.
Another study titled “Factors influencing Women empowerment in Kenya”, which contributed to the research by the Africa Population Health and Research Council, found that Kenyan women are less empowered economically.
The study used data from the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, focused on married women aged between 15 to 49 years.
The study found out that only a fifth of the women studied were economically empowered, while, and only 17.7 per cent of the 18,213 women studied were empowered at personal, social-cultural, economic and multidimensional levels.
The World Bank describes empowerment as an individual's ability to make intentional choices and translate them into desired outcomes.
The report has called for a comprehensive, more integrated approach that addresses structural barriers and incorporates societal norms in empowering women.
Muyingo said an economically empowered woman will benefit more than one sphere of her life because her influence goes beyond her career progress, to the community around her.