Woman’s lot not usually a happy one
Executive summary of a report titled The Status of Women In The South African Economy, released by President Jacob Zuma on Women’s Day in Sasolburg
ENSURING women’s full participation within the South African economy is essential if ideals of equity, prosperity and shared and inclusive growth are to be achieved. However, women around the world have historically faced numerous barriers to their engagement in the economy.
These barriers reduce their employability, constrain their ability to participate on their own terms, restrict the options available to them and limit utilising their full potentials.
Many of these barriers exist today and may take various forms. Some of these barriers may be legislated out of existence – while some may require support and intervention from government and other actors within society.
Importantly, though, some barriers are the manifestation of attitudes, assumptions and traditions that unfairly impact on women and girls.
In many ways, these types of barriers may be more difficult to remedy than others, but they must be tackled if the South Africa envisaged in the Constitution is to be realised.
This report explores the status of women within the South African economy. Its aim is to detail the current situation, while providing insight into some of the trends that are discernible in the data.
In this way, the report is able to identify some of the areas where society broadly has been successful and others where refocused efforts are needed.
The report covers five broad themes within this area: education; labour market; access to credit, land and property; poverty and inequality; and unpaid work.
This is certainly not an exhaustive list of the facets of women’s economic interactions, but covers what we believe to be some of the key areas from a policy perspective.
Education arguably underpins much of women’s full engagement in the economy, as is the case for men, and is therefore central to the achievement of gender equality.
It provides access to more remunerative areas of the labour market through improved skill and productivity levels, and may have similar impacts for the self-employed, but it also enables women to engage more meaningfully in society and make betterinformed decisions. At a broader level, education is seen as key to reducing poverty.
Furthermore, without investment in education, countries’ ability to harness the demographic dividend is significantly impaired.
The report explores women’s status in education in two main areas: access and attendance, and educational outcomes and performance. Data on enrolment indicates that females account for an increasing proportion at higher levels of education.
As a result, by the time they reach post-secondary education, females outnumber males by a ratio of around three to two. Despite this favourable position, women remain less likely than men to enrol in higher degrees.
Household survey data indicates lack of finances remains a problem for educational access for both sexes.
However, it also reveals that females are considerably more vulnerable to family commit- ments and may be sacrificing their education for others in a way that males are perhaps not required to. Relatedly, pregnancy remains an important factor keeping young women out of school.
Nevertheless, evidence on outcomes such as functional literacy rates and mean years of education point to improvements for women over time.
In fact, in a number of areas women have overtaken men and may be extending their lead. Data on mean years of education, in particular, reveals a generational switch in the relative educational fortunes of females and represents an important achievement in terms of addressing gender inequality.
Challenges, though, remain in females accessing and participating in mathematical and science-related fields, with females tending to cluster instead in non-STEM fields.
The second focus area is the labour market, which is certainly the key arena in which most individuals most regularly engage with the economy. Productive employment provides access to resources via wages and inequalities within the labour market may therefore have far-reaching conse- quences in other areas.
Thus, an environment that enables women to effectively engage in the labour market is essential to address some of the various economic inequalities that exist between the sexes.
Unfortunately, though, the economy continues to reveal itself unable to generate sufficient jobs for those that wish to work and, although employment has risen gradually over the past five years, so too have unemployment rates.
Employment gains have accrued to women across the educational distribution, while older women and African women have benefited from above average employment growth rates.
Women’s employment, though, is more concentrated in a smaller number of sectors than men’s, with 84 percent of female employment in the services sector. This concentration may expose women relatively more to down turns within those sectors.
Despite education gains, women remain more likely to be employed in low-skilled occupations. This difference is driven by the large proportion of women working as domestic workers. Conversely, women are less likely to be employed in the informal sector. Within the formal sector, women are more likely to have written contracts and leave entitlements and are less likely to work excessively long hours.
Women dominate lower earnings categories. This is borne out by tax data.
An investigation of access to land, credit and property comprises the third section of the report. These three areas relate to the ability of women to engage in the economy and sustain livelihoods through leveraging assets.
South Africa has over the past 20 years been progressive in promoting access to credit for women. The country has implemented various programmes aimed at supporting women’s access to credit.
The evidence suggests that women within South Africa have relatively equal access to credit in various borrowing contexts, although barriers to business financing remain due to a lack of collateral and lower levels of financial literacy.
Unfortunately, little data exists with respect to ownership of land and property among women. Based on the limited available data, however, results are mixed and intertwined with geographical and cultural contexts. The challenge seems particularly acute in rural areas, presenting an opportunity for impact through government’s land redistribution and tenure programmes.
Asset inequality in South Africa has declined during the post-apartheid period. Females and female-headed households have, on average, lower access to both private and public assets than males and maleheaded households.
The improvement in access over time has been more rapid for female-headed households and we have seen a narrowing of the gap between male and female-headed households.
In terms of public asset access, an area in which government is a significant roleplayer through its provision of services and housing, gender inequality is lower.
The provision of public services or assets is an area of particular success for government over the past 20 years and has brought enormous benefits to ordinary South Africans.
In the fourth focus area, the report investigates changes in poverty and inequality over the past several years. While poverty has declined since the end of apartheid, females remain more likely to be poor than males. Additionally, poor females tend to live further below the poverty line than their male counterparts, suggesting greater vulnerability.
These differences are even larger when considering data using the sex of the household head.
Poverty, though, is felt more keenly by specific groups among the female population. Rural or non-urban females are relatively worse-off than their urban counterparts, while African and Coloured females also experience high poverty rates relative to Asian and White females.
The data suggests the social grant system makes a significant impact in reducing poverty rates at both the household and the individual level, with female headed households considerably more reliant on grant income than maleheaded households.
The final area focuses on unpaid work and women’s contribution to total production.
Determining the relative contributions of males and females to the economy is a challenging task. The report provides a number of estimates of women’s contribution to GDP, each of which make strong assumptions.
These estimates suggest that women’s contribution to GDP is probably somewhere of the order of 35 to 45 percent.
The key problem with these is that estimates based on GDP and wages systematically underestimate women’s contributions due to women’s specialisation in unpaid work – the production of non-market services within the household, which are not included in estimates of GDR Estimates of the extent of unpaid work suggest it is significant, although these estimates are very sensitive to methodological choices around wage rates.
In terms of time use, however, it is clear that women are responsible for the lion’s share of unpaid work, with women bearing a particularly large burden in terms of care work.
The report also presents findings emerging from research into the demands on individuals’ time at different stages of the life course and how this may differ between males and females.
Using data from 2010, it is shown that not only do females spend more time in aggregate in unpaid work, they also spend more unpaid time at each age on average than their male counterparts.
Combining time spent in unpaid work with time spent in market work reveals that females also spend more time in productive work in total at each age than males, with the gap particularly large during the late teens and early 20s.
Women between the ages of 30 and 45 have particularly strong demands on their time, spending more than eight hours on average a day in productive activities.
Based on the profiles presented and assuming no change in them, it is estimated that a woman would cumulatively spend 15 500 hours more than a man in productive activities between the ages of 10 and 70 years.
The demands women face on their time hold important implications for their labour force participation. Raising participation would require interventions related to the provision of childcare and related services to allow women to actively seek, find and keep employment.
Alternatively (or in addition), South African society needs to find a more equitable gender-distribution of unpaid work through changed social norms regarding the distinction between “women’s work” and “men’s work” within the home.