Professor Linda Meyer | Managing Director | Rosebank International | Visiting Professor | Nelson Mandela University | mail me |
Seventy years ago, some 20,000 women marched to the Union Buildings. They took a stand against a proposed law that would strip them of their freedom of movement and ownership of themselves. The law would force 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 in 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. However, pay equality tells a different story once we look beyond the formal job market.
In registered, tax-paying jobs, women earn about 78 cents for every Rand that men earn as of 2021. This figure has fallen from 89 cents in 2008. Researchers using the South African Revenue Service (SARS) administrative tax data found that this gap has actually widened over time. However, the disparity becomes even greater in the informal economy.
Many South African women work as street traders, domestic workers, or in unregistered small businesses. In this sector, the gap balloons to 56.1%. Formal-sector protections like the Employment Equity Act cover only part of the workforce. Administrative tax records also cannot see informal work because workers do not report it 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.
This gap demonstrates why women’s rights cannot remain a constitutional promise alone. Equal treatment must also translate into equal economic opportunity and fair remuneration.
The executive glass ceiling
South Africa punches above its weight in the middle of the corporate ladder. Women hold 47.3% of senior management roles. This figure stands well ahead of the 32.9% global average. South Africa also ranks among the few countries reporting zero all-male senior management teams. However, that progress stalls near the top. Women occupy around 31% of executive committee roles.
The Just Share JSE Top 40 Women in Leadership finds that women hold roughly 38% of board seats. However, they hold only about 27–28% of executive roles.
The same research identifies three female CEOs among the JSE Top 40. It also identifies just five female board chairs among the forty companies. However, representation has not extended to authority. Women are strongly represented in CFO and HR leadership roles. Yet they remain far less visible in senior decision-making positions that control revenue and strategy. These are the seats that most directly shape a company’s direction and succession pipeline.
Today’s figures still mark real progress from a low base. In 2010, just 4.5% of JSE CEOs were women. However, women now occupy only about 22-25% of executive director roles. The numbers, therefore, point to a persistent, structural ceiling rather than a simple pipeline problem.
This matters because women’s rights include more than representation. Women also need meaningful authority to influence decisions, shape strategy and determine the direction of organisations.
Homemaker trap
Unpaid care work creates a gendered labour-market disadvantage in South Africa. Mothers absorb most of the childcare and household responsibilities. They pay a direct price in earnings, promotion prospects and job security. This reality exposes a stark gap between constitutional rights and everyday experience.
Time-use and gender statistics show that women spend three to four times as many hours on unpaid domestic and care work as men. Women devote about 64% of their time to unpaid domestic and care activities, compared to just 18.8% for men.
Counting Women’s Work research finds that South African women perform around 30.5 hours of unpaid care and housework per week. Men perform 12.2 hours. This means 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. This statistic underscores a homemaker trap that turns constitutional rights into unpaid obligations.
Relying on unpaid domestic arrangements
The Commission for Gender Equality’s Women in the South African Economy report shows that this burden falls especially on Black women. Many juggle low-paid jobs with extensive childcare and household responsibilities.
This pattern depresses their labour-market participation and career progression. It also underpins what economists call the “motherhood penalty”. Policy frameworks have not caught up with this reality. As a result, they reinforce a second “daughterhood penalty”.
This penalty refers to the career and income cost women absorb later in life when they become primary carers for ageing parents. Daughters are far more likely to shoulder this role than sons.
There is also no dedicated, universal system of publicly funded long-term care. Families must therefore rely on unpaid domestic arrangements. Often, Black grandmothers provide daily childcare so that younger adults can remain in paid work. In effect, they subsidise both the state and private employers, as highlighted by the Commission for Gender Equality.
These realities show that women’s rights also depend on how society values unpaid care. Legal equality cannot deliver meaningful empowerment if women continue to absorb disproportionate care responsibilities without adequate support.
Ageism and sexism in the workplace
Ageism combined with gender bias creates a distinct “double penalty” for older women in South Africa. This remains the case 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.
This discrimination can appear through retirement policies, succession planning and performance assessments. These practices can 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. These include unequal pay, sexual harassment and age-based exclusion.
Older women experience compounded disadvantage because their gender and age intersect in how others see and treat them at work. This double penalty is reinforced by how organisations respond to mid-life transitions and skills narratives.
Stereotypes about older women
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.
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. However, 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.
In practice, however, these biases often operate through culture and informal decision-making rather than explicit policy. This makes 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 are not always rights fully lived.
That distinction remains central to women’s rights. South Africa has strong constitutional protections, but those protections must translate into everyday experiences of equality, dignity and opportunity.
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. It means creating a policy that counts unpaid care as real work. Furthermore, it means building boardrooms that give women real decision-making power. It also means creating workplaces that stop treating age and motherhood as liabilities.
The march for women’s rights, therefore, continues. The challenge is no longer simply to secure rights in law. It is to ensure that women experience those rights in their pay, careers, homes and workplaces.