Every year in August we pay homage to the 20 000 courageous women of 1956, who marched to the Union Buildings to protest against the extension of pass laws to women. This was one of the instruments that the apartheid regime used to oppress black people.
That heroic act on August 9, 1956, - led by Lillian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia de Bruyn - did not only challenge the white minority regime of prime minister JG Strijdom, it also led to the demise of apartheid and contributed to the ushering in of our first democratic elections in 1994.
We thank these gallant heroines for playing a huge role in bringing about the non-racial, non-sexist democracy that we are all enjoying today. For all its weaknesses, I must commend our government for taking the lead in elevating women to positions of leadership in the public sector. This has helped develop a solid pipeline of capable, world-class women leaders, who are making an enormous contribution to our country and abroad.
A closer look at our cabinet shows that our government takes gender equality seriously and is prepared to entrust women with leadership and governance. Currently women ministers make up 41 percent of the Cabinet while female deputy ministers constitute 47 percent of the total number of deputy ministers.
Women MPs make up about 41 percent of MPs in the National Assembly. During the apartheid era just before the advent of democracy and in particular, women had a 2.7 percent representation in Parliament.
While we have made giant strides towards gender equality in the public sector, we are nowhere close to what Rwanda has achieved in advancing women. The central African country holds the honour of being the only country in the world with more female MPs than male MPs. About 64 percent of Rwanda’s MPs are female, a figure that is almost triple the global average of 21.9 percent of women who occupy parliamentary seats.
In the case of South Africa, our women leaders are flying our country’s flag high and are leading complex regional and global organisations, where they are working hard to make the world a better place.
Our own former cabinet minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the first female chairperson of the African Union Commission, is leading efforts to make Africa a conflict-free, politically stable, and prosperous continent.
Empowerment, equality
Her former cabinet colleague and former deputy president, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, is leading the UN’s Women’s organisation, which is promoting women empowerment and gender equality across the globe. And our highly acclaimed jurist Navi Pillay finished her term in August 2014 as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Across the globe, we have seen powerful women like German chancellor Angela Merkel, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, and Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, commanding complex ships whose steering straddles national governance, geopolitics, and international finance.
Merkel deftly steered Germany, Europe’s economic superpower, through the euro-debt crisis and pushed for austerity policies throughout Europe to help the continent regain its financial and economic strength.
Rousseff led Brazil to hosting the 2014 Fifa World Cup and brought the 2016 Olympics to South America’s largest economy; while steadfast in sticking with the progressive policies of her predecessor Lula da Silva, credited with lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty.
Lagarde has been a strong advocate for women’s inclusion in the global economy. There are many other women who are doing sterling work in the corporate world.
Yet the inconvenient truth is that women are still at the bottom of the pile in political and economic power structures.
In South Africa in the private sector, we are lagging the public sector when it comes to promoting women to leadership roles.
According to the Employment Equity Report released earlier this year by the Department of Labour, about 20 percent of top management positions in the private sector are occupied by women while 30 percent positions in the public sector are occupied by females, implying that there is an overwhelming over-representation of men, especially in the private sector.
In other parts of the world the gender gap is even worse, as Sheryl Sandberg in her best-selling book Lean In so clearly articulates in the numbers below. She writes that:
* 4 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives are women.
* In the US, women hold 14 percent of chief executive positions; 17 percent of board seats; and 5 percent of congressional/parliamentary seats.
* In Europe, women hold 4 percent of board seats.
* In the UK, 7 percent of executive directorships are held by women and 5 percent of board seats are occupied by women, in FTSE 100 companies.
The gender gap between men and women also extends to pay and remuneration. Women are also hard done in this area.
According to the International Trade Union Confederation Gender Pay Gap Report (2012), Zambia has the largest gender pay gap (46 percent) while Slovenia has the lowest (4 percent).
South Africa (38 percent), South Korea (43 percent), Asian countries (30 to 40 percent), and the USA (19 percent) rank among the countries with the highest pay gap between men and women.
Christine Lagarde once eloquently stated that economies that were gender-inclusive performed better than the ones that were not. “All economies have savings and productivity gains if women have access to the job market. It’s not just a moral, philosophical or equal-opportunity matter. It’s also an economic cause,” she once said.
There is also strong empirical evidence that companies that include women in their leadership and management teams attain higher profitability than the ones that lag behind.
A study done by Catalyst, The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on Boards, revealed that Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women board directors attained higher financial performance, on average, than those with the lowest representation of women board directors.
The study took into account three financial measures, namely: return on equity, return on sales, and return on invested capital. It found that companies with the highest percentages of women board directors outperformed those with the least by 53 percent (return on equity), 42 percent (return on sales) and 66 percent (return on invested capital).
From the Catalyst report it is safe to conclude that including women in business leadership is good business, doing the opposite is bad business. I strongly believe that if we put women at the centre of our economic development, they could play an important role in helping our country achieve the key objectives of the National Development Plan, which are to treble the size of our economy by 2030 and create 11 million jobs that we so desperately need.
* Dr Mathews Phosa is a former anti-apartheid activist, prominent business leader and philanthropist. He was recently presented with the prestigious Award for Excellence in Leadership at the African Achievers Awards.
* The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
BUSINESS REPORT