N Pandor: Mother and daughter tea at Pearson High School

6 May 2006

GIRLS ARE DOING BETTER

Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you very much to Kari Naude for
inviting me. Thank you for taking the initiative to invite me. I do not receive
many invitations from head girls and I appreciate the courage it must have
taken to write to me. I am pleased that you did and I am pleased to be
here.

Today I would like to focus on the challenges girls and women face and the
opportunities that are now available to girls and women in our society. As you
know, before 1994 many of these opportunities were an impossible dream for
millions of women and girls.

First, I think the biggest barrier to education access and success for many
South African and African girls exists outside education. It exists in our
families. It exists in our community arrangements. This is because the barriers
to access are as a result of the social context in which girls find themselves.
It’s a matter of how we raise our sons, how we raise our daughters, and the
kind of attitudes our societies have towards girls and women.

Today new opportunities are available to girls and women that were not
available in the past. If you look at the pictures of the pre-1994 cabinets of
South Africa, you will see only white males. There was a woman appointed for
the first time in the middle of the 1980s, but generally apartheid society and
apartheid oppression was male in character, was white in character, was middle
aged in character.

That has now changed completely. For the first time we have large numbers of
women in parliament. We have women as school principals. We have women as vice
chancellors of higher education institutions. We have women heading
parastatals. We have women business executives in South Africa.

The essential point that has emerged from the experience of many societies
is that you cannot pursue access to education without addressing the social and
political barriers that impact on women’s empowerment.

Our success in this aspect of social change has been supported by a positive
Constitution and a strong and visible advocacy for gender equality. It has
helped to move South Africa toward becoming, a society that will reflect
equality between genders. In education we have reached gender parity at school
and university level, this fact will be a positive contributor to the
empowerment of women in South Africa.

A further success is that girls do better than boys academically and have
done so for several years now. But girls do not do best in every subject. In
education we are encouraging girls to succeed in the non-traditional
disciplines. Because in many of our societies, girls have access, but they
become nurses, they become primary school teachers, they become social workers,
and males remain the engineers, the physicists, the chemists, the biochemists,
the genetic micro-biologist and girls do not access those opportunities. We are
encouraging girls to focus on maths and science, and to aspire to be engineers,
to be accountants, to go into business.

Third, girls’ success at school has to translate into success in higher
education. Because if you have women who’ve all completed school, but very few
who have degrees, you have not really altered the make up of your society. So
we have higher education scholarships particularly for girls to support them in
study, especially in the critical fields of engineering, science and
technology. And this scholarship program is beginning to show real success.

In closing, I believe there is still a great deal that South Africa needs to
do in order to ensure that women are truly empowered. For example, I am
particularly worried about the content of some of the schoolbooks that our
children read. Our curriculum content does not sufficiently treat women in a
respectable manner, does not accord with the constitutional provision that we
are equal.

So I believe that the curriculum must be shaped to reflect the kind of
aspiration for young women that we have. I believe that we need to use a gender
lens to look at our teaching material. We need to be saying: does this book,
this material, this approach sufficiently addresses the kind of gender equality
that we would want to have in our education system.

Clearly then, there is a great deal in the intellectual domain that we need
to do in order to promote gender equality. Over all, South Africa has begun to
show positive outcomes in the area of girls’ education. I welcome the success,
but I believe it is a beginning. We cannot be complacent on the basis of our
early successes. Our challenges are significant. There are still thousands of
girls who are victims of social discrimination and abuse and who have had no
educational opportunity. Some of them are adult women in our society and we
must find a way of addressing their needs.

We also must ensure that the energy directed at gender equality does not
exclude boys. Because you cannot have disempowered boys as a result of
empowered girls; you must have true gender equality. So we must ensure that
boys are not marginalised in our keen desire to pursue the success of
girls.

Thank you very much for your kind attention.

Issued by: Department of Education
6 May 2006