When Malta, a tiny nation in the Mediterranean, joined the EU in 2004, only 34% of its labour force were women. Since then, a big shift has taken place.
By 2020, 67% of Maltese women were working — a participation rate that has outpaced the rest of Europe — and this rose to 73% last year.
In part, this is explained by the extraordinary number of foreign women now working in Malta, but it’s also due to intentional government policies that promoted this change. These include free childcare, parental leave, flexitime and specific empowerment initiatives for women re-entering the workforce.
Needless to say, Malta is far ahead of most countries. While the global gender divide in workforce participation has narrowed in recent decades, men still remain more likely to engage in the labour market.
But the shift remains unarguable. Governments worldwide have woken up to the socioeconomic benefits that arise when women are integrated to a greater extent into the labour market.
Research in 2018 by the IMF examined the economic rewards tied to gender inclusion, establishing a clear link between a country’s productivity growth and its efforts to bolster female participation. The study also delved into factors that are still obstacles to this such as inadequate parental leave, residual discrimination and an unequal investment in skills.
These barriers cost economies plenty, while closing the gender gap tends to produce more positive effects on growth and overall welfare than previously estimated.
A closer look at South Africa’s progress
So where is South Africa on this score?
As it stands, about 54% of women work, surpassing the global average of 47%, even if it lags behind men (where 65.4% work).
And, while it’s good news that the workforce gap between men and women has narrowed from 15.5% in 2008 to 11.4% today, the bad news is that this is not because there are more women working, but rather because the number of men in jobs has fallen.
So, the fact remains that there are several problems we need to overcome if we want to boost the number of women contributing to the workforce. Six of them are:
- Educational disparities: there’s still a distinct gender imbalance in schools, with girls being asked to stay home and help rather than get an education. In 2021, Stats SA’s general household survey revealed that 13% of girls aged seven to 18 don’t attend school due to “family obligations”, compared with less than 1% of males.
- A funding gap: that survey also showed a lack of money deters one in four school-aged girls from attending school, compared with one in seven boys.
- Unpaid work: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development’s database highlights a stark contrast in the time women dedicate to unpaid care work, such as housework and community service, compared with men. The ratio of female to male time allocation stands at 2.8 in South Africa, signifying that women commit nearly three times more hours to unpaid activities.
- Gender wage gap: South Africa has made progress towards pay parity. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) global gender gap index shows we have closed 79% of the wage gender gap. Still, the rate at which that gap is closing has slowed after Covid, implying that achieving full parity may still take years.
- Access to capital and resources: women entrepreneurs encounter greater hurdles in accessing capital and resources than men, which limits the growth of women-led businesses. WEF research showed fewer than one in 10 businesses in South Africa are now majority-owned by women.
- Traditional gender roles: societal expectations and traditional gender norms inhibit women’s ability to pursue certain careers. Stats SA’s quarterly employment report for the first quarter of the year reveals that only a third of managerial roles are taken up by women, while women occupy more than 70% of clerical jobs. Equally, women are underrepresented in mining (one woman for every five mining jobs), construction (one in seven), transport (one in five) and utilities (one in four). This is possibly due to a lack of mentors, as well as discrimination and flaws in the recruitment process.
Can policy change this?
Clearly, there are no silver bullets that could swiftly close the gender gap, but there are several policies that could at least shift the dial. These include enacting laws to ensure equal property rights and credit access for women, eradicating gender-based violence, addressing sector-specific gender inequality and providing expanded child and elderly care to encourage more women to enter the workforce. Malta remains a beacon of what these sorts of intentional policies can achieve.
It has, of course, been too slow — more than six decades have passed since that day in 1956 when 20,000 women of all races marched to Pretoria to demand equal recognition for women.
That it hasn’t happened faster remains yet another shackle around the legs of our economy. Data shows that greater participation by women in the workforce boosts GDP growth, while fostering social cohesion. But if we’re serious about any sort of real equality in our society, the empowerment of women remains an indelible part of this narrative.
* Packirisamy is an economist at Momentum Investments