Cultural shift needed to empower women as future leaders – Rodrigues

Minister within the Housing and Water Ministry, Susan Rodrigues has highlighted a need for a cultural shift that challenges traditional gender roles and empowers them to take leadership positions, where endless opportunities await.
Stressing the importance of fostering confidence and inclusivity to break down barriers, Rodrigues, called for a shift in mindset among women in the workforce.
She urged women to recognize their potential as future leaders and to remove self-doubt, as Guyana continues its rise.

The minister was at the time speaking at a panel discussion at the ongoing 2025 Guyana Energy Conference and Supply Chain Expo
“A man can have zero knowledge about a specific work subject and he will tell you that he is the right one for the job and you would have a woman in that same room with 5 degrees and 25 years of experience and she’d say that she doesn’t think that she’s the right one for the job…we just need to have that confidence.”
Meanwhile, she added that women need to stop blocking their own pathways by these longstanding presumptions she relayed,
“Sometimes we have to move out of our own way I think a lot of times we are always looking for someone to fix the problems for us and we need to get out of our own way most of the times and I think that we can achieve infinite possibilities.”
Minister Susan also relayed that there has been an array of social issues that have around and the women of Guyana are being empowered be the government as it pertains to freedom for the firm to get their own territories.
“There are many social issues that still face, that we are still faced with in our communities, especially in rural communities, and being able to give women that empowerment and that freedom for them to have a place of their own and for them to be able to leverage that and access collateral, have a collateral that they can access financing.”
She added, “Because you know, our banking system is shifting now away from collateral base in terms of real property, but that has really given a lot of women an opportunity over the last four years to be able to access financing and to be independent and to control their own finances so those are just some of the impacts That we’ve had in the housing sector.”
Sharing a similar view, Managing Director of SLB, Sharlene Seegoolam, expressed that women should move away from the belief that leadership is reserved for a different gender or group.
“You have to challenge that mind model a CEO can be anybody they can look like me challenge the mind model and the third educate because everything is a Pyramid and you need a big population to get things to the top,” Seegoolam stated.
The panel also highlighted that while these recommendations have been made to empower women, there has been significant progress in women’s participation in various programs. Notably, the Goal Scholarship program for 2025 saw a record 70% female participation, marking a historic achievement.
In 2023 it was recorded that the Board of Industrial Training (BIT) has been successful in empowering a vast percentage of women to step out of their comfort zones and become certified and employed in male-dominated areas.