Budget fix for women’s job crisis
Nearly half of South African women are left out of the country’s labour force — and gender-friendly budgeting could fix that
Marking what could be confirmation that South Africa’s jobs crisis has started to wane after the pandemic’s onslaught, the country’s unemployment rate has retreated for the second consecutive quarter.
Data released by Statistics South Africa this week shows the unemployment rate fell to 33.9%, bucking expectations that the jobless level would tick up amid the second-quarter economic headwinds.
A deeper look into the statistics exposes an uncomfortable reality — nearly half of South African women are left out of the country’s labour force. In the second quarter of this year, 47% of South African women were recorded as economically inactive, meaning they are not in paid work and also not looking for a job.
Women’s Month is typically replete with this type of data, laying bare the types of hurdles to participating in the economy this segment of the population faces compared to men. Analysts say, by loosening constraints on women, through policy and the budget, the government creates the conditions for a healthier economy.
The recently released 2022 Women’s Report focused on how fiscal policy affects women. Speaking to the Mail & Guardian this week, economist Ingrid Woolard — who contributed to the report — noted that “to create a more equal society, one needs to think about what the barriers are for women”.
“If those barriers are around financial and childcare constraints, then you have to loosen those constraints to ensure broader participation of women in the economy.”
One way the government has sought to do this is by creating a grant system that is, partly by design, targeted at women. Woolard explores this in her chapter of the report.
“We don’t talk a lot about the fact that most of the grant recipients are women and that that was a deliberate measure to figure out how we do better for society. Well, one of the ways we do that is by putting money in the hands of women,” Woolard said.
In the 1990s, the architects of the child support grant, the Lund Committee, noted that women’s participation in the labour market had at the time increased substantially, but they still account for only 39.6% of the labour force. The unemployment rate for women was 35.2% in 1993.
Today, women account for about 45% of the labour force, however, their rate of unemployment is slightly higher at 35.5%. The unemployment rate among men in the second quarter of this year was 32.6%.
The Lund Committee noted that there was a concern that social security benefits would reduce the likelihood of people seeking jobs.
However, as Woolard says in her chapter, evidence has shown receipt of the small, regular income provided by the child support grant “expands women’s autonomy, choices, dignity and social recognition”.
The child support grant, Woolard adds, “gives women some small measure of financial independence and increases decision-making power over financial resources”.
She noted research shows women in rural households are more likely to migrate to find work if their households are receiving a grant.
“Obviously, you could migrate and maybe you find a job, maybe you don’t find a job. But it doesn’t seem that households receiving grants are just sitting on their hands.”
Cheryl-lyn Selman, a researcher at the Institute for Economic Justice, said a more gender-responsive framework of policy and fiscal intervention is needed to arrest the crisis women face in South Africa.
“There are deep structural issues with the way the South African economy runs, contributing to why women are on the back foot,” she said.
“And until we recognise that, it will be difficult to apply an appropriate set of solutions or policy tools. It is as though we are staring at a blazing fire that is kilometres wide and trying to shoot at it with a water pistol.”
As Selman points out, South Africa’s economy suffers from deep structural issues that hinder women from participating in the labour force and earning a fair income. The gendered division of labour means that when women attempt to participate in the workforce, they shoulder the additional burden of being responsible for childcare and other forms of unpaid care work, which has come to be known as the “double shift”.
“In households, childcare, care for the aged, care for the disabled, all still remains almost entirely a women’s burden. This drives a cycle of a set of decisions on who can access what level of earnings, and the way money is spent in the household, which ends up fixing women into a dependent and comparatively vulnerable position in society,” she said.
“Until we have a level of policy analysis that looks at the feminisation of poverty, how the gendered division of labour perpetuates this cycle — and recognises this is a crisis and we need to start doing things fundamentally differently — and rewrite policy so that we have got an honest, binding gender-responsive budgeting and policy framework … it is really unlikely we will be in a different position any time soon.”
The Scandinavian model is often referenced as an example of how governments can tackle gender inequality through fiscal intervention.
“There is still inequality in those societies,” Selman noted. “But at far lower levels than what we are facing here … In their gender-responsive budgeting framework, there is the absence of a commitment to fiscal austerity. That directly affects where the government spends money and how it prioritises particular kinds of care infrastructure which have a direct, positive impact on the lives of women and their ability to participate in the labour market.”
Since the early 2000s, Sweden has pursued gender equality through its budget. The country’s labour force participation rate among women was 81% in 2019, according to a modelled estimate by the International Labour Organisation. The rate was still higher for men, at 85%. But in South Africa, that gap is far wider. The participation rate for women in the second quarter of this year was 53%, compared to 64.4% for men.
Sweden’s gender equality policy includes guaranteed childcare for parents and “parental insurance”, which enables couples to take six months off per child, with each parent entitled to half of the days, easing the burden of childcare on women, freeing them to take paid work.
In Scandinavia, Selman pointed out, governments recognise investing in care infrastructure is as good for their economies as investing in power stations and transport. “This is how we need to be thinking in South Africa,” she said.
The economic advantages of bringing women into the fold are clear.
“Women form 50.4% of our working-age population. There is no economic benefit to keeping half of the potential workforce less educated and skilled, paid substantially less for doing the same work done by a male counterpart and consequently less able to access a better quality of life and to save and invest. These impediments impact children and other household members and make up some of a continuous set of issues that hamstring labour force participation and women’s agency.
“There is no economic benefit to keeping a part of the economy in a space where there’s a lesser level of education, a poor level of pay and a set of issues that hamstring labour force participation,” she said.
“So even if you just look at it on a purely economic basis, we keep the economy suppressed by keeping women in a subservient position. The very things that we say are important to us, like driving growth and creating jobs, those are all hindered by not dealing with women’s lack of equality in the economy.”