Honourable Members
Ladies and Gentlemen
This year marks the sixth year since the adoption of the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development. The Protocol aims to provide for the empowerment of women, to eliminate discrimination and achieve gender equality by, among other things, implementing gender-responsive legislation, policies and programmes.
Since the adoption of the Protocol, South Africa has made significant strides on gender parity. In SADC (Southern African Development Community), it is the leading country in the area of gender and governance, according to the SADC Gender and Development Index (2015).
On the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index (2014), it is ranked 18 out of 142 countries.
Over the past decade, women have entered the corridors of power in their numbers, and occupied non-traditional spaces, including the Ministries of Home Affairs, and Defence. In less than 20 years, they have contributed to radical changes in laws, policies and service delivery that have resulted in far greater gender awareness and responsiveness in the country’s governance than ever.
The representation of women in Parliament increased from a mere 2.7% before 1994, to 34% in 2015. Women constitute 52% of Chairpersons of Committees in Parliament. This ranks South Africa third in the world in terms of representation of women in Parliament.
In provincial legislatures, female representation has almost doubled since 1994. Female representation in provincial legislatures increased from 23.5% in 1994 to 41.5% by 2013. Of nine speakers of provincial legislatures, eight are women.
At Executive level, of 35 national ministers, 15 are women, representing 42.8% of all ministers. In 2009, 15 of the 32 deputy ministers were women (46.8%) and in 2014, out of 37 deputy ministers, 17 were women, representing 45.9%. Out of the nine premiers, only two (Northern Cape and Western Cape) are women.
With regard to the Judiciary, statistics currently show that in our 20 years of democracy 311 new judges were appointed. Of these, only 76 are women.
The situation is more acute at the Supreme Court of Appeal where out of 25 judges only 7 are women while the Constitutional Court has 2 women judges in its 11-member panel. Regarding racial demographics we can proudly report that there are 155 black judges, inclusive of black women, out of a total of 243 judges. This we view against a backdrop of only one black judge in 1994.
The limited number of women who advance to the Bench can be attributed to the low number of female legal practitioners in comparison to their male counterparts. As at the end of 2013, women made up 1 841 of the total number of 5 708 practising advocates on the roll of advocates. During the same time there were less than 6 000 practising female attorneys out of a total of 22 500.
Despite the great strides made, we have a long way to go in achieving absolute gender parity. Research suggests that the percentage of working women in senior management posts throughout the country, not only leaves much to be desired as it continues to remain lacking, it has also remained static for the past six years.
In 2013 just over one quarter of top decision-making roles in the country’s businesses were filled by women. This is a long way off government’s ambition to ensure that 50% of senior management positions are filled by women.
As has been the case since 2009, only 28% of the country’s senior management positions are filled by women and the statistic has disappointingly flat-lined for five years. This stagnant five-year trend is the same when global averages are reviewed, with international businesses also showing no improvement since 2009, remaining at 14%.
It is worth noting that Parliament, through vigorous consultations, has engaged with the 50/50 representation provisions of the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development, particularly through its processing of the Women Empowerment and Gender Equality (WEGE) Bill, which lapsed at the end of the fourth Parliament due to its incomplete status.
The stakeholders that were consulted, especially from business circles, found the Bill to be unworkable and unfair as, they submitted, it would punish business for something that could not be implemented.
The Minister in Presidency has since reported that the WEGE Bill was a duplication of existing legislation, such as the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (also known as the Equality Act), and that our efforts must rather be focused on monitoring the implementation of our existing legislation and review these to ascertain whether or not they have delivered their intended objectives. This places a lot of responsibility on Parliament, as the legislative and oversight authority of the State.
I must add that the Equality Act, although calling for the prohibition of unfair discrimination on grounds of gender, does not provide for the explicit targets called for in the SADC Protocol, like the WEGE Bill did. So, although the effective implementation of existing legislation would go a long way in promoting gender equality, none of these have the specific legislated quotas for women, as stipulated in the SADC Protocol.
This is very significant as, through mapping voluntary, constitutional and legislated quotas across Southern Africa, the 2013 SADC Gender Protocol Barometer shows that in both local government and Parliament, countries with quotas have a far higher representation of women than those without.
Through Parliament’s legislative and oversight mandates, we have an obligation to conduct the same degree of oversight over our government’s international obligations as we do over national policies and laws. This, in fact, is one of the strategic actions that the fifth Parliament has committed itself to under the priority of “enhanced parliamentary international engagement and cooperation”.
The South African government has signed, and Parliament has ratified, the SADC Gender Protocol and now it’s our responsibility to ensure that the targets we committed to are realised. We cannot step away from this responsibility.
National Development Plan and Gender:
South Africa’s National Development Plan (NDP): Vision 2030, seeks to create a united, prosperous, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic society. How this will be achieved, is by focusing on creating equal opportunities, and specifically, nullifying factors such as gender and ethnicity, and by so doing, righting the wrongs of the past and ensuring true equality before the law.
The NDP envisages an economy and developmental society that serves the needs of all South Africans, rich and poor, black and white, skilled and unskilled, those with capital and those without, urban and rural, women and men.
The agreed-upon key actions include broadening opportunities through economic inclusion and specific redress measures.
The Commission on Gender Equality and the then Ministry for Women, Children and People with Disabilities had been tasked with the role of jointly setting and reporting on targets for the advancement of women’s rights. Another milestone worth mentioning is the review of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), now the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE). Employment equity and other redress measures continue and can certainly be made more effective.
However, it should be noted that because the NDP is the vehicle that will address poverty, unemployment and inequality in South Africa, it therefore becomes an imperative that the strategies of implementation become explicit about the approaches that will be used, so as to ensure the inclusion of the previously marginalised, such as women, and thereby achieving gender equality.
It is widely accepted that mainstreaming is essential for securing human rights and social justice for women as well as men, it is also increasingly recognised that incorporating gender perspectives in different areas of development ensures the effective achievement of other social and economic goals.
In order to fully appreciate the need for mainstreaming gender in policies of development, one first needs to understand why this is an issue to begin with. Gender is an issue because of the fundamental differences and inequalities between women and men.
In South Africa, as in other SADC countries, women and men are distributed differently across manufacturing sectors, between formal and informal sectors, within agriculture, and among occupations.
Women are also more likely than men to be in low-paid jobs and “non-standard” work (part-time, temporary, home-based), and likely to have less access than men to productive assets such as education, skills, property and credit.
These patterns mean that economic trends and economic policies are likely to have different implications for women and men. For example, trade liberalisation has had uneven impacts by sector, with consequences for both gender equality and economic growth that have only recently become the subject of investigation.
I would like to use this opportunity to request that we apply our minds to the following suggestions:
1. That, in the absence of legislated quotas, we continue to advocate in our respective political parties for 50/50 election lists ahead of the 2016 local government elections;
2. That we continue to advocate for quotas in our respective political parties, as the proven means to increase women’s representation in the political sphere, to ensure that we reach 50/50 women’s representation in Parliament and the provincial legislatures in 2019 – not only at institutional level, but within each and every political party represented;
3. That we explore ways to ensure that the implementation of existing gender equality legislation is better overseen, with a view to determine how these can be improved; and
4. That we also consider how we can give effect to the 50/50 targets of the SADC Protocol, either through legislative amendments to existing legislation or whether the WEGE Bill needs to be reintroduced.
We also should consider how best our discussions today and tomorrow can infuse the theme of the upcoming SADC Parliamentary Forum to be hosted by South Africa under the theme of “ Industrialisation and SADC Regional Integration: the Role of Parliaments” in Durban from 3 July to 11 July this year.
I trust that the Women’s Caucus will continue its good work in, among other things, promoting the discussion of women’s issues in Parliament, and engaging on developmental and empowerment issues with women in political structures outside Parliament.
I thank you
