Women still earn 24% less
DESPITE major strides and progress made in gender equality for women over the past 20 years, there was still a long way to go in the economic and social sectors. Globally, women still earned 24% less than men, said UN under-secretary-general and executive director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka yesterday.
Her address was part of discussions on women’s economic empowerment at the Wits club in Braamfontein, hosted by UN Women together with Oxfam and Wits University.
“No country in the world has achieved gender equality. Laws in many countries make it hard for women to accumulate assets. The majority of women are in low-paying jobs where their rights are not protected,” she explained.
The Minister of Women, Susan Shabangu, added that women continued to lag in the workplace.
“We find ourselves in places we didn’t study for and in certain sectors there are still unwritten laws that are barriers to women.”
Shabangu said these barriers made sure women could not pursue their chosen paths.
“She has to choose between being a mother and wife or a professional woman, she can’t be both. We can’t have this … these two cannot compete with each other because the world needs people and women are the bearers of people,” Shabangu told a room filled to capacity with women from across Africa and beyond.
The focus was to examine ways in which economies could work for women, especially as 70% of working women were based in the informal sector in low-paying jobs.
Speaking on the academic sector, Wits vice-chancellor Professor Adam Habib said there had been “phenomenal progress” over the past 20 years.
Engineers
“What’s happening at Wits is a microcosm of what’s happening in society. Of our enrolment in the university, 58% are women. Forty-Five percent of our mining engineering students are women, whereas 20 years ago we struggled to have even one,” he said.
But while there were “incredible advancements” of women, simultaneously “the most terrible atrocities” were taking place on campuses across the country and the world, Habib said.
“The culture in residence and the abuse of women where they are targets. There is a crisis: on-campus rape.”
When looking for solutions to gender disparity, said Habib, one had to look closely at the social context.
“Context matters because it makes a difference if we’re looking at New York, London, Johannesburg or Tembisa. You have to look at the class structure and the vulnerability of young women, their rights access and the access to legal rights they can bring to their defence,” he said.
Habib added that what must be thought through was how the universal strategies discussed could be applied to “different social contexts”.