Good evening
It is a pleasure and it is an honour to be here this evening. And it is an honour to have dinner with women who have succeeded in engineering.
Women in South Africa have made great strides in the past fifteen years, but the challenges facing women continue to be daunting gender discrimination continues.
Yet things are changing. And things are changing more visibly and effectively through access to education and the promise it holds for women and girls.
Educating women
At school we have reached universal primary enrolment. We have enrolment rates of nearly 90 percent in our secondary schools. We have achieved gender parity. In fact, girls now constitute a majority in our secondary schools, although there are more boys in primary school than girls.
More girls in school mean that there is a knock on effect at university level. There are more women at university than men not in all fields, but over all.
We are not alone in this development. The growing number of women in higher education seems to be a contemporary phenomenon in both developing and developed countries.
In 83 of 141 countries women outnumber men. They do so not only in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries but also in countries like Mongolia and Guyana where university education is not widespread. We appear to be following the trend more women at universities and more women graduates.
You can see the trend most vividly in the United States (US). Currently, in the US there are two million more women than men in college. Estimates are that within five years, six in ten of those entering US colleges will be female. There have been reports that some universities are managing their admissions to avoid overloading their student bodies with women.
Not only are there more women in higher education than men, but women also outperform women in higher education. Women have long outperformed men in OECD countries. Now the same pattern is emerging in developing countries and particularly in middle income developing countries like ours.
However, there is a major problem. A great number of our young students do not graduate. Nearly six in ten of first year students who entered university in 2000 had dropped out of the system in four years. Female students constitute more than half of this group. Even more distressing African female students constitute seven in ten of this female student group.
What are the reasons for this failure? Money and lack of academic support are the two most obvious candidates. Despite excellent government funding, more needs to be done and more funding has to be made available.
Other factors may include students’ inappropriate career choices or simply their inability to cope or retain their focus upon their academic studies within the context of a relatively free environment with minimal supervision.
Strategies have to be devised to ensure that we not only improve our intake of African and women students, but that we also improve their chances of successfully progressing through the system.
More women at university and more women graduates mean more women in the work force. There is still a gap. There are still more men in paid employment. But the gap is closing. In 2005, out of 200 countries, 122 saw female workforce participation rise, often quite sharply. Surprisingly, some of the sharpest increases came in the Middle East and North Africa, including Iran, Libya, Syria, Jordan and Tunisia.
These are really positive trends. Gender parity at school and university will in time lead to greater changes in family and society. Better educated women help countries move into higher tech businesses. Better educated women often encourage smaller family sizes. Better educated women are better for men as well even though they may not accept it or welcome it. When women earn more than their husbands, family roles change as well. I know, you know.
Women engineers
We are short of engineers in South Africa today. Not enough engineers graduate each year. I have taken this matter up with deans and university vice chancellors.
Each year there are 1,400 BSc Eng and B eng graduates from our universities. Only half of those 1,400 go on to practice as engineers; a lot of them go on to work in banks and other financial institutes. In any case, we need to quadruple the number of graduates, so that we have a larger pool to draw from. We have earmarked university funding to encourage more students to take up engineering.
I should add that we also need more women engineers.
Why?
Because we need the best people as engineers, that is why. If you eliminate women, you are eliminating half of your potential. That would be a waste and has been a waste in the past.
In the past you could get by without science and technology. Just. Not any more. Science and technology now make the world go round. And we need the best people as scientists. It would be daft to eliminate half of the talent, to say women can’t be scientists, can’t be engineers, and can’t be doctors. What a waste of potential. What a waste of talent. What a waste of education all those women in higher education, outstripping and out-thinking their male peers.
The stats are not good. The latest United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) survey of 89 countries reveals that less than 30% of researchers are women.
Not across the board. Some regions are better than others.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, women account for 46% of the reported number of researchers. In contrast, the share falls to 15 percent in Asia and about 30% in Africa as well as Western and Central Europe.
Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA) focussed attention on education and particularly on the importance of boosting the numbers of science, engineering and technology graduates from our tertiary education institutions.
The worry in government has always been that business does not do enough training, that business has not done enough for the development of skills.
Yet if there is one thing that we have learned from the JIPSA initiative, it is that an immense synergy can be created if government and business work together constructively.
In May 2007 a survey, undertaken by business as part of this analysis, revealed that 70 JSE listed companies spent close to R4 billion a year on training their employees. These companies represent only a small sample of all employers. So that spend on training is probably significantly higher.
In closing, let me say that South Africa is a far better place to live in now than ten years ago. It is a far better place for women. It is a far better place for women to develop as individuals. Yet there is still so much further to go. How many of you have heard of what Baroness Greenfield, a leading scientist, calls the impostor syndrome. So many of us suffer from this syndrome, you know that feeling that one day we will be caught out, that we feel that some man can do the job better than us, and that it was by some twist of fate that we have the job we have today.
We are not impostors. And that is what associations like this one are so important in our society.
Thank you.
Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
25 June 2009
