Women need equality in workplace

DEAR SIR — Every year for the past 20 years, SA has been celebrating Women’s Day, and we expanded it to make every August Women’s Month.

Celebrations, while necessary, sometimes create a false sense of achievement and progress. SA is a long way from living up to the promise of the 1956 women’s march to the Union Buildings.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. With the political battle of equality won through a constitution that outlaws all forms of discrimination, women have made great strides in politics and the public sector. In business, the progress has been disappointingly slow.

To fulfil the dreams of the courageous women who marched to the Union Buildings nearly 60 years ago, we need to deal with the more difficult challenge of the dominant male model. Here are two recent examples that show the subtle ways in which male dominance is reinforced.

Lego, with a history dating back to 1932, only recently started changing the ratio of male to female minifigures as well as giving the female mini-figures occupations that are traditionally male dominated.

Also recently, Nitin Nohria (pictured), the dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS), pledged to more than double the percentage of women who are protagonists in HBS case studies over the next five years, to 20%.

Despite the fact that for the first time in US history, there are more women in the workforce than men, about 9% of Harvard case studies have women as protagonists. As 80% of the cases studied at business schools around the world are HBS cases, Mr Nohria’s newly stated objective for case studies will have a significant effect on the way leadership is taught in the world’s business schools.

While, over the past 20 years, significant progress has been made in South African politics and the public sector, a lot still needs to be done in the private sector to challenge the maledominant model. As a father of two girls, I am passionately contributing to this progress so that my girls and many other girls in SA in 10 to 15 years’ time, will join a private sector that gives men and women equal opportunities in the workplace. Frank Magwegwe Centurion