Gender inequality drags women down

The spotlight is on gender inequality in our country and around the world.

The recent and almost daily headlines about the attacks, abuse and killing of women, coupled with the recently commemorated International Women’s Day have focused the spotlight on gender inequality in our country and around the world. This issue is dragging down world development and making it difficult for efforts to reduce poverty, hunger and diseases.

It was the late author and essayist Christopher Hitchens, who articulated it better, when he wrote: “The only known cure for poverty that has ever worked is the empowerment of women.”

While strides have been made to break the shackles of patriarchy and the oppression of women around the world, and with many women increasingly participating in the social, economic, cultural and political spheres in many corners of the world, it is not yet uhuru (a Swahili word meaning freedom in English). We have yet to eradicate women exploitation, decimate the scourge of women oppression and also conquer the demon of patriarchy.

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The Burkinabé Marxist revolutionary and pan-Africanist theorist, Thomas Sankara, captured it best, when he said: “Women’s fate is bound up with that of an exploited male. However, this solidarity must not blind us in looking at the specific situation faced by womenfolk in our society. It is true that the woman worker and simple man are exploited economically, but the worker wife is also condemned further to silence by her worker husband. This is the same method used by men to dominate other men! The idea was crafted that certain men, by virtue of their family origin and birth, or by ‘divine rights’, were superior to others.”

This is considerably true because at the heart of gender inequality are unequal power relations between women and men in our society, where men control and dominate women’s lives, and women are in a subordinate position. This system has a social and economic basis, characterised by racism and capitalist exploitation.

Negation of roles

In South Africa, race and gender oppression and class exploitation were combined in an interconnected system under apartheid and colonialism. Apartheid capitalism profited through the large numbers of African women working for lower wages than their male counterparts. Women’s unpaid labour in rural areas also enabled bosses to pay extremely low wages to migrant workers who lived in bachelor dormitories in complete negation of their parental and family roles.

The new democratic dispensation and the adoption of a progressive constitution brought visible changes for the majority of the formerly oppressed. The constitution and other legislation outlawed discrimination of women and called for measures to redress past imbalances in terms of race, sex and disability and other prohibited grounds of discrimination.

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South Africa has also ratified a number of international conventions that promote equality between men and women. These measures were meant to transform our society in meaningful ways, but our lived experience under democracy has shown that legislation needs to be accompanied by other interventions, in particular a strong state with the political will to redistribute and reallocate resources to address structural inequalities along gender, racial and class lines.

Despite these, we still witness a situation where access to basic services is still skewed in racial, gender and geographic terms. Women still continue to be the face of poverty and HIV and Aids, especially black working class women. Socio-economic conditions and patriarchal attitudes that justify and perpetuate abuse of women are driving the staggeringly high rates of domestic violence and rape in South Africa. Women also remain responsible for the bulk of unpaid reproductive labour including all of the work that contributes to reproducing society, such as housework, child bearing and child rearing, which is invisible, not paid and not counted in national statistics.

A central aspect of the struggle for gender equality is that reproductive work should become a societal responsibility. Women’s experience of oppression is affected by their race, class, geographic location, age and other factors. For instance, women with disabilities, especially black working class women with disabilities, are marginalised and lack access to support.

The levels of unemployment and poverty experienced by young black women are extraordinarily high. Lesbians are discriminated against in the workplace and in society purely on the basis of their sexual orientation. Migrant women are vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and violence, and are generally not organised into local unions.

Remain outside

The unchanged apartheid structure of the South African economy means that the majority of black women, in particular young African women, remain outside the formal economy. Women still bear the brunt of poor infrastructure and services as they have to carry the responsibility of caring for the sick, elderly and children.

If we are to achieve gender parity, we need a huge cultural and mindset change to take place. The strategy to achieve women emancipation should simultaneously involve organising women to come together in solidarity and unite against their oppression, while also recognising the importance of male allies. This struggle though remains the task of women and they need to take leadership for their own liberation. Male allies in the gender struggle must guard against acting in ways that reinforce their power and privilege. We also need to acknowledge that not all of the nation and society’s problems will be solved immediately because laws have been enacted.

Women’s participation in the economy remains key in fighting gender inequality. Fighting gender inequality within the workplace must be linked to fighting inequality in the broader society.

Gender inequalities in households and society reinforce gender inequality within the labour market. For instance, unequal access to education reinforces labour market inequality in terms of skill. Access to basic services, such as transport, health care, child care and water, are critical both for quality of life and the ability to participate in productive work.

It is therefore important to ensure that economic and social policies are gender sensitive and gender biased. Campaigns for a social wage and social security, including a basic income grant, free basic services, national health insurance and free education, among others, are important in this regard. The trade union movement needs to pay special attention to women workers that are in vulnerable sectors and are doing unsafe work, which is not always protected by law and where enforcement is weak. These include domestic workers, farm workers, informal sector workers, casual workers and migrant workers.

Workplace struggles should ensure that workers, including women, have the right to stable and secure employment opportunities. Women have a right to a living wage with comprehensive social security systems and access to basic services. They have a right of access to training, decent working hours and equal opportunities.

We all need to intensify our campaign to ensure that workplaces allow for a proper balance between work and family life. This will only be achieved if women take the lead in their own emancipation by joining and leading unions and other organisations that will allow them to participate in the process of reshaping the workplace to structure the economy for their own benefit.

Zingiswa Losi is Cosatu’s second deputy president.

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