Gender Main Streaming Practices and Women Career Advancement at Bank of Uganda

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to establish the extent to which gender mainstreaming practices influenced women career advancement in Bank of Uganda (hereafter BOU). Specifically, the study strived to establish the extent to which internal recruitment practices, women safety practices and work-family balance practices influenced women career development in BOU. The study used a cross sectional design adopting both quantitative and qualitative approaches on a sample of 93 respondents. Data was collected using questionnaire and interview guide. The study found out that internal recruitment gender practice predicted 45.7%, Women safety practice predicted 46.6% while Work-family balance predicted 36.3% of the variance in women career advancement. The study concluded that the problem of women career advancement in BOU prevailed and was highly associated with procedural inequality in internal recruitment and lack of an adequate gender affirmative action in internal promotion process, sexual harassment, bullying, inflexible forms of work and inadequate employee assistance programs. The study recommends that to foster women career advancement and contribute to achievement of the MDG III, the management of BOU should strongly commit itself to affirmative action by gender mainstreaming. The internal recruitment process should be adopted (with affirmative action) in the identification of talents for development (succession planning) to take up future managerial positions. The BOU management should strengthen the sexual harassment practice and concretize the bullying practice through sensitization/awareness building and taking of adverse disciplinary action on proved cases, continuously exploit and adopt flexible work forms and explore the provision of adequate employee assistance programs such as day care centers and facilities, as well as sabbatical leave.