Four women giv­en promi­nence in this week’s Busi­ness Guardian, mul­ti­plied thou­sands of times over, are rea­sons why In­ter­na­tion­al Women’s Day 2023 is so spe­cial for us here in T&T.

There are many as­pects of their sto­ries which make it so. One, Ms Natasha Davis, Dr Priya Mara­jh, Ms Rhon­da Lan­dreth-Smith and Ms Pria Nar­i­nesingh, rep­re­sent, if not com­plete­ly, a quite wide cross-sec­tion of so­ci­ety’s dif­fer­ent eth­nic and so­cial groups.

Two, that so­ci­ety con­tin­ues to be one in which male dom­i­nance pre­vails. More­over, that age-old priv­i­lege is aid­ed and abet­ted by sys­tems, per­spec­tives and day-to-day block­ages which re­tard the ad­vance­ment and de­vel­op­ment of women in the world of work and in so­cial and hu­man re­la­tion­ships.

Their ex­pe­ri­ences, both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive, must pro­vide guide­lines for T&T.

The va­ri­ety of ca­reers of the women range through en­gi­neer­ing, busi­ness and fi­nance, man­age­ment and cre­ative en­deav­ours.

That fact shows that women can no longer be pi­geon-holed in­to nar­row con­fines which pre­vi­ous­ly spoke of “women’s work” – the now in­fa­mous cat­e­gori­sa­tion by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Er­ic Williams of cre­at­ing a “Kitchen Cab­i­net” for fe­male min­is­ters be­ing an ex­am­ple of an age thank­ful­ly gone.

Through per­sis­tence and far-sight­ed­ness, al­though orig­i­nat­ing from one of the many stig­ma­tised com­mu­ni­ties in the coun­try, Laven­tille, Ms Davis trans­ferred in a very prag­mat­ic and far-sight­ed man­ner, dic­tat­ed by the mar­ket, to uni­ver­si­ty pur­suit of busi­ness and fi­nance to reach the po­si­tion of T&T Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion COO.

Ms Nar­i­nesingh has been al­lowed by the pol­i­cy dic­tates of in­ter­na­tion­al au­dit­ing and ac­count­ing firm, Ernst and Young, to reach the lev­el of man­ag­ing part­ner be­cause of a dis­crim­i­na­tion-free work­place. It is one, she says, based com­plete­ly on abil­i­ty and ap­pli­ca­tion to the job. Com­pa­nies which con­tin­ue to sus­tain bar­ri­ers, should look and learn.

In times past, the rough, tough en­er­gy sec­tor de­nied some­one such as Dr Mara­jh en­try. Pro­gres­sive­ly, her pas­sage through uni­ver­si­ty made pro­vi­sion for her aca­d­e­m­ic and pro­fes­sion­al suc­cess.

Ms Lan­dreth-Smith chose ad­ver­tis­ing, an area of cre­ative work it may have been thought would be open for fe­male artis­tic en­deav­our, which, in fact, posed sev­er­al chal­lenges. But her re­fusal to back-off and de­ter­mi­na­tion to make her views known en­sured sur­vival and as­cen­sion.

In all of the in­stances, the four women fea­tured in the T&T Guardian Busi­ness Mag­a­zine showed that like so many of their peers, they were ful­ly able to cope with chal­lenges.

In the in­stance of Ms Davis, she ex­em­pli­fied the fact that al­though her sec­ondary school ed­u­ca­tion was at a non-pres­tige in­sti­tu­tion, it posed no bar­ri­er to her am­bi­tions and per­sis­tence.

For Ms Nar­i­nesingh, her urg­ing to young women of this and any gen­er­a­tion is not to ex­pect peo­ple to step aside to make way for them; fight­ing through the dif­fi­cul­ties may be re­quired, and she ad­vis­es those who fol­low not to be afraid of bat­tle.

But she re­mains con­cerned that notwith­stand­ing her suc­cess­es and that of many oth­ers, women con­tin­ue to face con­tin­u­ing re­tard­ing cir­cum­stances.

The learn­ing for men, es­pe­cial­ly those still with dis­tort­ed no­tions of the sup­posed in­ca­pac­i­ty of women, is to see the ad­vance of their wives/part­ners and “sis­ters” as en­hanc­ing their own sta­tus.

The achieve­ments of these women adorn this year’s In­ter­na­tion­al Women’s Day.