By Africa.com | Created at 2026-08-11 13:15:44 | Updated at 2026-08-11 16:27:47
3 hours ago
Seventy years ago, some 20,000 women marched to the Union Buildings to take a stand against a proposed law that would strip them of their freedom of movement and ownership of self, forcing them to carry passes that dictated where they could live, work and exist. This Women’s Month commemorates their legacy of defiance against subjugation. And while 32 years of democracy have brought change, how far has South Africa really come on women’s empowerment and equality? On paper the Constitution guarantees equality, dignity and freedom from discrimination for every woman. In practice, those rights still unravel in the pay slip, the boardroom, the home and the job interview before they fulfil their promise.
Gender Pay gap
Women’s rights may be enshrined in South Africa’s Constitution, but pay equality tells a different story once you look beyond the formal job market. In registered, tax-paying jobs, women earn about 78 cents for every rand men earn as of 2021, down from 89 cents in 2008. This is a gap that has actually widened over time, according to researchers using SARS administrative tax data. But step into the informal economy, where many South African women work as street traders, domestic workers, or in unregistered small businesses, and the gap balloons to 56.1%.
Formal-sector protections like the Employment Equity Act cover only part of the workforce, and administrative tax records can’t even see informal work, since it isn’t reported to SARS at all.
“The constitutional promise of equal pay unravels fastest precisely where it’s hardest to measure, in the informal economy, leaving many of South Africa’s most vulnerable working women furthest from equality in practice,” says Prof Linda Meyer, MD at Rosebank International and Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University.
The Executive Glass Ceiling
South Africa punches above its weight at the middle of the corporate ladder, with women holding 47.3% of senior management roles. This is well ahead of the 32.9% global average and one of the few countries reporting zero all‑male senior management teams. However, that progress stalls near the top where women occupy around 31% of executive committee roles.
The Just Share JSE Top 40 Women in Leadership finds that omen hold roughly 38% of board seats but only about 27–28% of executive roles, with three female CEOs of the JSE Top 40 and just five of forty board chairs.
However, representation has not extended to authority. Women are strongly represented in CFO and HR leadership roles but remain far less visible in senior decision‑making positions that control revenue and strategy, the seats that most directly shape a company’s direction and succession pipeline.
Today’s figures still mark real progress from a low base where just 4.5% of JSE CEOs were women in 2010, but with women only reaching about 22–25% of executive director roles now, the numbers point to a persistent, structural ceiling rather than a simple pipeline problem.
Homemaker Trap
Unpaid care work creates a gendered labour-market disadvantage in South Africa, where mothers absorb most of the childcare and household responsibilities and pay a direct price in earnings, promotion prospects and job security. This exposes a stark gap between constitutional rights and everyday reality.
Time-use and gender statistics show that women spend three to four times as many hours on unpaid domestic and care work as men, with women devoting about 64% of their time to unpaid domestic and care activities compared to just 18.8% for men.
Counting Women’s Work research finds South African women perform around 30.5 hours of unpaid care and housework per week versus 12.2 hours for men, meaning women shoulder roughly 72–81% of all unpaid care time nationally.
Of the 2.4 million people who cite “homemaker” as their reason for not being in the labour force, 2.1 million or 88.2% are women, underscoring a homemaker trap that turns constitutional rights into unpaid obligations.
The Commission for Gender Equality’s Women in the South African Economy report shows this burden falls especially on Black women, who often juggle low-paid jobs with extensive childcare and household responsibilities, a pattern that depresses their labour-market participation and career progression and underpins what economists call the “motherhood penalty.” Policy frameworks have not caught up with this reality, reinforcing a second “daughterhood penalty” — the career and income cost women absorb later in life when they become primary carers for ageing parents, a role daughters are far more likely to shoulder than sons.
There is also no dedicated, universal system of publicly funded long-term care, forcing families to rely on unpaid domestic arrangements. Often Black grandmothers provide daily childcare so that younger adults can remain in paid work, effectively subsidising both the state and private employers, as highlighted by the Commission for Gender Equality.
Ageism and sexism in the workplace
Ageism combined with gender bias creates a distinct “double penalty” for older women in South Africa, even though both age and gender are explicitly protected grounds under the Constitution and the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998. Labour‑law guidance and compliance analyses show that older employees frequently encounter subtle but pervasive discrimination through retirement policies, succession planning and performance assessments that treat age as a proxy for declining value despite clear statutory prohibitions on direct and indirect age discrimination in recruitment, promotion, training and dismissal.
Research on ageism in Gauteng’s public service similarly finds that South African women face workplace inequalities including unequal pay, sexual harassment and age‑based exclusion, with older women experiencing compounded disadvantage because their gender and age intersect in how they are seen and treated at work.
“This double penalty is reinforced by how organisations respond to mid‑life transitions and skills narratives. Studies on unpaid care and labour‑market trajectories show that women’s peak caregiving years, for both children and ageing relatives, often overlap with the stage when employers expect continuous availability and “limitless” flexibility, yet offer little formal support for care responsibilities or for biological transitions such as menopause,” says Prof Meyer.
At the same time, older workers, and older women in particular, are routinely stereotyped in management literature as less adaptable to new technologies or hybrid work arrangements, even though empirical studies find that digital skills and adaptability vary more by access and training than by age alone.
In law, discriminatory practices that push older women out of promotion pools or into early exit can be challenged as automatically unfair, but in practice these biases often operate through culture and informal decision‑making rather than explicit policy, making age and gender discrimination harder to see and easier to deny. It is the same pattern seen across pay, leadership and unpaid care. Rights promised in law but not fully lived.
The march continues
The women who marched on the Union Buildings in 1956 forced South Africa to confront an unjust law. Democracy has since introduced better protections. Yet equality on paper has not yielded equality in practice. Closing that gap means putting the law into practice, through policy that counts unpaid care as real work, boardrooms that give women real decision-making power, and workplaces that stop treating age and motherhood as liabilities.
