The Net­work of NGOs of Trinidad and To­ba­go for the Ad­vance­ment of Women is dis­ap­point­ed that of nine In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tors named by Pres­i­dent George Maxwell Richards, on­ly two are women. "This is by no means in­tend­ed to cast as­per­sions on the choic­es of In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tors," said Net­work In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions Di­rec­tor Dr Kris Ram­per­sad, "but two out of nine is tremen­dous­ly dis­ap­point­ed giv­en that over the past few terms, prece­dent has been set to keep an al­most 50 per cent gen­der bal­ance on the In­de­pen­dent bench­es with four or five fe­male In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tors. "And it is par­tic­u­lar­ly un­sat­is­fac­to­ry, giv­en the Pres­i­dent's own ac­knowl­edge­ment of the lack of ap­pre­ci­a­tion of the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of women in our coun­try at the swear­ing in of Trinidad and To­ba­go's first fe­male Prime Min­is­ter, Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar," Ram­per­sad said.

"We all heard how elo­quent­ly the Pres­i­dent lament­ed the 'deficit' in the coun­try's deal­ings with women and to quote him: 'There is no gain­say­ing that our women have made tremen­dous strides in the pub­lic as in the pri­vate sec­tors...and there have ex­ist­ed and con­tin­ues to ex­ist a cer­tain reser­va­tion, on the part of men as well as women, in gen­uine­ly re­spect­ing the abil­i­ty as well the en­ti­tle­ment of women...and many of us do not re­pose full con­fi­dence in our women to act in­de­pen­dent­ly of pa­tron­age of one kind or an­oth­er.' "Giv­en that, the net­work finds it very dif­fi­cult to be­lieve that the Pres­i­dent could not find women in our pop­u­la­tion who could com­pe­tent­ly oc­cu­py seats on the In­de­pen­dent bench­es.

"It is high time we move be­yond the rhetoric and val­ue and recog­nise the po­ten­tial for lead­er­ship at all lev­els in our coun­try's women. "Mean­while, the net­work con­grat­u­lates the an­nounce­ment of Op­po­si­tion Leader Kei­th Row­ley to have its two fe­male sen­a­tors lead Op­po­si­tion busi­ness in the Up­per House with Port-of-Spain South MP Mar­lene Mc­Don­ald as the coun­try's first ever woman chief whip and Pen­ne­lope Beck­les as the first fe­male Sen­ate mi­nor­i­ty leader. "We note that the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship has not yet named its full slate of 16 sen­a­tors, and giv­en its strong gen­der ap­peal in the cam­paign for the elec­tions, we an­tic­i­pate that it will en­sure that women share an equal num­ber of seats to men in the Gov­ern­ment bench­es of the Up­per House," Ram­per­sad said.