Men continue to dominate decision-making positions, new survey shows

Statistician-general Risenga Maluleke released Gender Series Volume IX: Women Empowerment, 2017-2022 report on Tuesday.

 The report provides insight into gender disparities, trends and patterns in economic empowerment, including an in-depth analysis of economic, social and political domains related to gender.

While there has been an increase in the proportion of seats held by women in Parliament, the report shows that men were more likely to hold mayoral positions than females (68,0% vs 32,0%) in all of the country's nine provinces.

Maluleke says North West is the only province where municipalities have parity regarding mayoral positions, while Western Cape and Gauteng remain the two provinces which had the lowest representation of women mayors.

Maluleke says this comes in spite of more women turning out to vote during elections.

"The political domain of women empowerment assessed women's participation in politics. The progress showed that the cabinet reached parity as 50,0% of the seats comprised of women and the proportion of seats held by women in Parliament increased from 33,0% in 2004 to 46,0% in 2019.

“At the local government level, males were more likely to occupy mayoral and councillor positions than females. More women than men registered to vote and turn out to vote in the general and municipal elections in 2019 and 2021, respectively. The provinces with the highest share of women registered to vote in the most recent local government elections were KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, and Limpopo.

“Politically there is significant progress towards gender equality in Parliament with the number of women in parliamentary seats having increased since 2004 and with a 50,0% parity in the cabinet. However, at the provincial and municipal levels disparities in the decision-making positions as municipal and councillors are still dominated by males," said Maluleke.

Maluleke says the situation repeats itself in the labour force.

"The gender gap of 0,778 in monthly median earnings between male and female shows that there are inequalities in monthly median earnings. Parity in earnings was only reached with tertiary education. Furthermore, women continued to be more likely than men to be unemployed.”

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