PESHAWAR - Participants at an awareness workshop underlined that the traditions and cultural norms are the root cause behind the gender disparity, which ia depriving women from political, constitutional and empowerment rights in the society.

They stressed the need for serious efforts to end the gender inequality and provision of equal rights as this tendency badly keeping the women from contributing towards nation building.
The day-long “Media Sensitization Workshop on Women Issues” organized by Aware Girl, a non-governmental organization, here at a local hotel here. More than 25 participants from print and electronic media organizations, and representatives of non-governmental organisations participated in it. On the occasion, Aware Girl Chairperson Gulalai Islmail, Executive Director Saba Islmail, Program Director, Leema Khan and members of the organization were present.
Gulalai highlighted the basic aim of the awareness workshop and said that the organisation is being actively working for the empowerment of young women through advocacy and capacity building to enable them to become agents of change and empowerment in the society. She delivered a comprehensive lecture on “Gender Equity and Equality” and said that the women are being faced number of challenges due to lack of empowerment and adequate resources. She attributed that the women legitimate and constitutional rights were oppressed under the primitive culture and traditional emerged in the society.   Though, he viewed, the boom of industrialization system had played a vital role in giving due rights to women, yet there needs to be done much more for their empowerment, she stressed. “The gap of gender disparity could be filled only through provision of equal opportunities, share, quotas, and power in their decision making to women,” he suggested.
Leema Khan, the Programme Director, in his presentation on “Women Politics, issues and way forward”, said that women were not much empowered economically and socially due to the absence of required measures at government level.
She said that the unequal distribution of resources and access to resources are the main reason behind the growing gender disparity in the society. Owing to lack of support from male elected representatives in the parliament, she said that a number of bills were deferred in the national and provincial assemblies.
Similarly, Leema said that the traditional, and culture norms, and feudal system are another major impediment before the empowerment of women, saying that the women were not much aware about their constitutional and legitimate rights, because of low literacy rate in women.
She said that the women are not contributing well their share in national economy due to domestic restrictions and other hurdles. During the group-work, the participants also stressed the need for highlighting issues facing women in attainment of their political, constitutional and legal rights.  They said the media should its active role to highlight the women problems on way of their due rights.