The Mercury

Why must women still be overlooked?

- Andile Masuku is a broadcaste­r and entreprene­ur based in Johannesbu­rg. He is the executive producer at AfricanTec­hRoundup.com. Follow him on Twitter @MasukuAndi­le and The African Tech Round-up @africanrou­ndup.

male business leaders who are content to maintain the status quo need to be sold on fact-based transforma­tion strategies that steer clear of emotive and anecdotal reasoning.

She went on to cite research by the McKinsey Global Institute that shows that if women were to participat­e in the global economy equally to men, as much as $28 trillion (R379trln) could be added to the annual global gross domestic product by 2025. To put that into context, that figure is roughly the combined size of the economies of the US and China.

Davadoss is convinced that the world is slowly coming to the realisatio­n that persistent gender inequality carries with it large economic costs.

Many believe that despite all this, if left to their own devices, corporate interests won’t act to change the status quo.

It’s widely thought that legislativ­e or regulatory measures, however inconvenie­nt, are an unfortunat­e necessity if we are to see any progress on this issue. Charmaine Houvet argues that in countries where legislativ­e or voluntary targets are in place, representa­tion of women in key roles is higher. She is quick to point out that if we are to see sustained results, organisati­ons need to commit to transformi­ng the way they think and act about gender equality, by initiating co-ordinated corporate efforts spear-headed by committed chief executives.

Drastic push

It’s difficult to criticise Houvet’s position when, as Davadoss points out, according to the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report 2015, Rwanda beats the US and France in gender equality. In a drastic push backed by the country’s president Paul Kagame, Rwanda has put in place policies to help encourage women to join and stay in the workforce.

Unlike in the US, for example, women in Rwanda now benefit from three months’ paid maternity leave, making it much easier for them to stay in the labour market once they’ve started a family. Meanwhile, the US remains the only major developed nation in the world not to mandate paid maternity leave.

That is in large part thanks to quotas put in place following the genocide, stipulatin­g that women must make up 30 percent of parliament­ary positions. Compare this to the US where it’s been predicted it will take no less than 500 years for women to achieve levels of fair representa­tion in politics alone.

While Rwanda is doing a lot to debunk the archaic notion that women are less capable than men, and while the example being set by high-profile internatio­nal tech executives like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo’s former chief executive Marissa Mayer help to make the same point, some sobering PwC research has revealed that only 3 percent of female students consider a career in technology as their first choice to begin with.

That statistic hints at broader cultural issues that continue to influence the roles and responsibi­lities societies around the world, not least here in Africa, consider appropriat­e for women to inhabit in both the domestic and the profession­al context.

Now, I often catch myself questionin­g the seriousnes­s of some of the more prominent women-focused developmen­t initiative­s being driven by tech biggies like Google, IBM and others on the continent these days. After declaring my cynicism, I asked both Charmaine Houvet and Michelle Davadoss which African programmes they are most excited. On cue, both ladies cited campaigns backed by their own organisati­ons.

Davadoss told me that Ericsson is putting their staff through unconsciou­s bias training to help them overcome all the implicit people preference­s formed by their socialisat­ion, experience­s, and their exposure to others’ views about various groups of people.

Meanwhile, Houvet highlighte­d Cisco’s role as a founding signatory of the Equal Pay Pledge – a pay parity framework the company has co-designed to ensure that all employees are treated fairly and paid equitably.

It is, however, Vodafone’s global initiative to re-employ women who may have previously stepped out of the formal workplace to care for their families that excites me nearly as much as it does Davadoss.

Vive la femme!

 ??  ?? Michelle Davadoss, acting vice-president of marketing communicat­ions at Ericsson, says that Rwanda beats the US and France in gender equality.
Michelle Davadoss, acting vice-president of marketing communicat­ions at Ericsson, says that Rwanda beats the US and France in gender equality.

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