Poor support for sexual harassment victims and limited career paths for female academics plague higher education institutions, which a new initiative hopes to fix.
The University of Pretoria's Centre for Human Rights is releasing a gender audit tool today for use by universities and other tertiary institutions across Africa in a bid to break down gender equality barriers at these institutions.
Researcher Yvonne Oyieke said the tool would be distributed to all higher education institutions on the continent who could then decide whether or not they wanted to use it.
It will also be available on the university's website. The tool is in the form of a questionnaire with six categories - management and governance, policy, student life, human resources, teaching and research and institutional culture.
Some of the questions included: "What proportion of your senior management are women?" and "Are cases of sexual harassment reported according to policy?"
The centre encourages institutions to set up focus groups and get staff and student leadership to answer the questions.
Once the scores are calculated, the centre will make recommendations for improving gender equality at that institution.
The tool will also allow it to track the progress of any gender equality initiatives implemented.
There is no cost involved.
A pilot study at the centre revealed that women remained under-represented, with 25% representation in middle management and on the executive committee.
The study also found that Pretoria University had "no gender policy or structure within the administrative system", and that "more effort [was] especially needed with respect to language and inclusivity".
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