National Youth Commission conference on Young Women and Development,
Johannesburg
30 August 2007
Women Chief Executives of companies
Non-governmental organisations working with HIV and AIDS
Members of the National Parliament and Gauteng Provincial Legislature
Mayor of Ekurhuleni and young women from all walks of life
It is a pleasure to be here today.
Let me begin by congratulating the National Youth Commission (NYC) on
arranging this information-sharing event for young women during this special
month of August.
August is women's month, a time to think of women of all races and classes
who fought and fight for freedom, and all those who have worked for gender
emancipation and equality.
We salute all those women and all the women who continue to strive for the
true liberation of South Africa from inequalities based on gender
discrimination.
In particular, we value the contribution that so many women have made to
education during the dark years of apartheid and since the beginning of our
democracy.
Women's month is not only a time to celebrate the courage and success of
women, but it is also a time to reflect on our values and lifestyles today.
The curriculum in schools today seeks to promote positive values and
principles as tools that young persons should use in their daily lives. Among
these core values are the key principles elaborated in our Constitution
equality, respect for human dignity, freedom of religion, association, and
culture. Important too are rights such as the right to education, the right to
health provision, the rights of children and the right to privacy. The
invitation to me today requested that the recent regulations on managing
teenage pregnancy should be the focus of my contribution. However, before
proceeding to that subject I wish to reflect briefly on the progress of women
and girls in education.
We are on the right course in terms of the empowerment and development of
women. Women have acted as a collective in many areas that supported the
transformation of their lives.
In union affairs, it is women leaders who focused on the most disadvantaged
workers and fought vigorously for better conditions of work.
In political organisations, women leaders and members have often been the
ones to place the gender agenda at the forefront of debate and action.
In the education sector, it is women who make up the majority of the work
force. The education sector has begun to reveal fascinating progress for girls
and young women. Today, new opportunities are available to girls and women.
Look at the evidence. There are more girls than boys in our schooling
system, they are more likely to complete Grade 12 and to do better academically
than boys.
In the higher education system, there have been significant changes in the
race and gender profile of the student body in our institutions. The proportion
of female students in the higher education system rose from 43% in 1993 to 54%
in 2003.
However, while this is a positive shift, we must be aware of the
inequalities that are masked by the overall statistics. It is a matter of
serious concern that the spread of women students across different programme
areas remains uneven, with women students clustered in the humanities and
under-represented in science, engineering, technology, and in postgraduate
studies.
While women students are well represented at undergraduate level in the life
sciences (52% overall), there continues to be low participation of women in the
mathematical sciences (42%), engineering (19%), computer science (35%). The
overall representation of women in health sciences and in commerce has improved
significantly and women participate in more or less equal numbers overall.
However, black women tend to be under-represented in most fields. (2002
figures) Of female university enrolments in doctoral studies in 2001, 65% were
white women and of those who graduated in 2001, 76% were white women. If one
looks at the doctoral enrolments of women in the natural sciences, 75% of these
enrolments in 2001 were in the life and physical sciences, five percent in
mathematical sciences and only two percent in computer science. The numbers of
women enrolments in these areas are still considerably lower than those of men,
and men are spread across a wider range of fields.
These statistics mirror the international situation for women in higher
education and the under-representation of women in most fields of science and
engineering, as well as at post-graduate level, is not unique to South
Africa.
The overall percentage of women academic (instruction/research) staff in
higher education institutions has grown from 35% in 1997 to 41% in 2003 and
there has been significant growth in the numbers of women academics overall.
However, women still make up only 17% of professors and are clustered in the
ranks of lecturer and below, at which levels they outnumber men. In addition,
women do not publish as much research as men. There are still very few women in
the management echelons of universities.
These indications of progress and of challenges that remain are all the more
reason for us to focus on the message of abstaining from early sexual activity
� as you are aware, this is a key part of the Abstain, Be faithful and
Condomise (ABC) campaign directed at HIV awareness.
The subject of early or teen pregnancy has received much attention lately.
Our society has become concerned at the growing number of girls who become
mothers while at school. It is important to state that the education sector
does not have definitive statistics on this subject, but the figures we have
begun to collect suggest extremely worrying trends.
I want to alert young women to the consequences of risky behaviour.
Schoolgirls today put themselves at risk when they get pregnant.
They put themselves at risk in two important ways. They put their health at
risk, and they put their futures at risk.
First of all their health, the risk of sexually transmitted diseases is
high. The consequences can be catastrophic. Then they also put their futures at
risk.
We know that teenage mothers are less likely to finish school. And that
means they are less likely than their friends or boyfriends to get a job. More
than this, teenage mothers are likely to become single parents and to live in
poverty. In turn this puts their children especially girl children, at risk, at
risk of poor health and at risk of becoming teenage mothers themselves. And so
the generational cycle turns and repeats itself.
Those are the personal risks.
But there is also a risk for society at large. When teenage mothers drop out
of school, there is a risk to our social and economic fabric. Failure to finish
matric is a major cost to our society and economy. We need to retain
schoolchildren in school until they matriculate so that they are able to
contribute to economic growth and our national project of development and
transformation.
The consequences of risky teenage behaviour are huge, for all of us, well
into the future.
The growing trend of young mothers puts at risk much of what we have
achieved over the past thirteen years for the empowerment of women. Despite our
educational success, women are more unemployed than men. Since 2001, when it
was first conducted, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) has consistently recorded a
higher unemployment rate among women, compared to men. The most recent data,
recorded in the September 2006 LFS, reports an official unemployment rate of
21,2% for men, compared to 30,7% among women.
What more do women need to do about this inequality?
The 1998 Nobel laureate for economics, Amartya Sen, had this to say about
African women in general � he was comparing India with Africa in talking about
his 2005 book Argumentative Indian. Despite the massive economic growth in
India in recent time, half of Indian children are chronically under-nourished.
He was asked why India was unable to feed its poor.
His answer was this: "I think (India) goes wrong in two respects. One, even
though Africa has famines, higher mortality rates and much more chaos, the
issue of eating enough is quite a big issue in Africa. The African rebellious
spirit is stronger. The other reason is, women are much more important in
Sub-Saharan Africa, they have a much bigger voice. We know, within India,
whenever women have had a bigger voice; the hunger problem has dramatically
reduced. The fact that gender inequality is far less in Africa is not unrelated
to the fact that regular hunger is also far less in Africa than in India."
Women need to have "a much bigger voice" in our country.
The struggle continues. We have not yet been admitted into paradise. Women
are still the victims of sexual and violent abuse. Women are still abused
belittled and humiliated within marriage.
So we lag behind in the work place and at home, but we are reaching for
gender equality in education. Widening access to education has been one of the
key thrusts of education reform since 1994. We have widened access and
opportunity to young women whose parents were excluded by decades of racial and
gender discrimination.
However, we as a society have some way to go in truly achieving gender
equity in terms of eradicating those factors that continue to impede the
advancement of women.
And one of those factors is teenage pregnancy, it prevents far too may
schoolgirls from completing school. The pregnancy management measures are as a
result of detailed discussions within my department and with my provincial
colleagues. These measures encourage teenagers to abstain from sex, but they
also provide a framework for the management of schoolgirl pregnancies.
They emphasise that pregnant schoolgirls have a right to education and
cannot be expelled from school because they are pregnant, but they also set out
guidelines for managing pregnancies so that the learning environment for other
learners is not compromised.
Parents and guardians have a critical role to play in teaching their
children about the risks of early pregnancies.
I want to conclude on this note. I cannot emphasise too much the importance
of parenting. Young people seldom think of the joys and responsibilities of
parenting when they are confronted by pregnancy.
Long gone are the days when fathers play no role in bringing up children. We
have a particular legacy in this regard to overcome, a legacy of family
dislocation brought on by a century and more of the migrant-labour system.
So boys should think long and hard about the consequences of teenage
pregnancy. They should think long and hard about care and support and not leave
women in a family to do the work.
Parents and the home environment they create are the single most important
factor in shaping a child's well-being, achievements and prospects. Government
is keen to encourage men to take responsibility for their children. Teenage
fathers should spend as much time with their children as possible, if their
children are to be given a good start in life.
Unmarried fathers have a parental responsibility for their children. Many
teenage fathers do not realize this and do not know this.
Finally, the measures are designed to assist teachers with guidelines for
supporting learners who become pregnant. They assert the right to education.
They create room for the parents to choose to care for their child. Most
important, and unusual, they refer to the right of the child to receive
care.
I would welcome the support of the Youth Commission in a joint campaign to
alert young people to the importance of 'ABC' in their daily lives.
Issued by: Department of Education
30 August 2007
