Women’s rights protected by law but equality remains out of reach for many

South Africa has made major strides in protecting women’s rights since democracy but for many women, equality remains something promised in law rather than experienced in everyday life.

This Women’s Month marks 70 years since about 20,000 women marched to the Union Buildings in 1956 to protest against pass laws that controlled where they could live and work. Three decades into democracy, campaigners and researchers say the fight has shifted from the law itself to how it plays out in everyday life.

On paper, the constitution guarantees every woman equality, dignity and freedom from discrimination. In practice, those rights are still being tested in the payslip, the boardroom, the home and the job interview.

The numbers tell a mixed story. Women in formal, tax-paying jobs earned about 78c for every R1 earned by men in 2021, down from 89c in 2008, meaning the gap has actually widened over the past decade. In the informal sector where many women work as street traders or domestic workers, the gap balloons to 56%.

Even where women have made progress, it appears to stall before reaching the very top. South African companies report that women hold 47.3% of senior management roles ahead of the global average of 32.9%. But that pipeline narrows sharply at executive level, where women hold only around 31% of executive committee seats.

Prof Linda Meyer, managing director at Rosebank International, said this is not down to a shortage of qualified women.

Many women receive advice, but fewer have senior decision-makers actively advocating for their appointment, placing them in business-critical roles, and ensuring their inclusion in succession plans

—  Prof Linda Meyer, Rosebank International managing director

“The figure suggests that the problem is no longer simply the availability of suitably qualified women. There is a significant failure to convert women’s representation at senior management level into appointments to the executive committee,” said Meyer.

She said executive roles are often filled from a narrow pool of operational and profit-and-loss positions where women remain under-represented, and appointment processes lean heavily on informal networks and subjective judgements about what leadership “looks like”.

Meyer also drew a distinction between women being advised in their careers and women being actively backed for promotion. “Many women receive advice, but fewer have senior decision-makers actively advocating for their appointment, placing them in business-critical roles and ensuring their inclusion in succession plans.”

She said closing the formal-sector pay gap would require:

• mandatory pay-gap reporting by occupational level;
• regular audits; and
• real consequences when problems were found.

Employers should publish salary ranges and take a harder look at bonuses and share schemes which are often out of pay equity checks altogether, she added.

For older women, the barriers can multiply. Meyer said many face a “double penalty” of sexism and ageism combined, often at the exact point in their careers when their experience should count most.

“Older women often experience the combined effects of sexism and ageism. Their competence, adaptability and ambition may be questioned at precisely the stage when their experience and institutional knowledge are most substantial.”

She called for training and leadership development to be opened up to older employees who are too often overlooked in favour of younger staff and for issues such as menopause to be treated as a normal workplace health matter rather than something left unspoken.

Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) spokesperson Javu Baloyi said South Africa’s legal framework on gender equality remains strong but turning those laws into real change is where the system keeps falling short.

“South Africa has a strong constitutional and legislative framework, but implementation remains uneven,” he said. “The key challenge is the gap between formal equality and substantive equality, driven by weak accountability, inadequate resources, poor implementation and persistent patriarchy.”

The laws are in place. It is the enforcement of these laws that is the issue

—  Prof Corné Davis-Buitendag, University of Johannesburg

Prof Corné Davis-Buitendag, an associate professor in strategic communication at the University of Johannesburg and an advocate for women’s rights, said the problem is not the law itself but the distance between what it promises and what women actually experience.

“South Africa has one of the strongest constitutional foundations for substantive gender equality. The problem is that the promises made in section 9 of the law does not translate into the lived outcomes for women in terms of their material conditions,” said Davis-Buitendag, referring to section 9(1) of the constitution, which guarantees equality before the law.

The gap comes down to how well those rights are enforced and the everyday conditions under which women are expected to exercise them, she said.

Davis-Buitendag said new laws are not what is needed, pointing out that legislation such as the Employment Equity Act already prohibits unfair discrimination in the workplace. The real issue is that this framework is not being followed, she said.

“The laws are in place. It is the enforcement of these laws that is the issue,” she said, citing the 2026 PwC report showing that women hold just 8% of leadership positions in South Africa’s top 200 JSE-listed companies. She also pointed to Statistics South Africa figures showing women’s unemployment rate sits at 36.4%, against 29.6% for men.

She linked this back to gender-based violence, saying that low prosecution and conviction rates for perpetrators reflected the same pattern of laws not being properly carried through.

“If there is no accountability for the implementation of laws, effective access to justice and stronger protection against economic discrimination, nothing will change in women’s lived experiences,” she said.

Unpaid work at home is a major reason why women continue to fall behind in the workplace and that it is still not being properly recognised or measured, said Baloyi.

“Unpaid care work remains undercounted because it is still largely viewed as a private household responsibility rather than an economic contribution,” said Baloyi. He said the CGE had briefed parliament’s portfolio committee on employment and labour on the issue, and that policy needs to catch up.

Ultimately care must be redistributed from women alone to men, families, communities, the state and the private sector

—  Javu Baloyi, Commission for Gender Equality spokesperson

“Policy must therefore recognise, measure and budget for unpaid care through time-use data, gender-responsive budgeting and investment in care infrastructure.”

Time-use studies show women spend three to four times as many hours on unpaid domestic and care work as men. Of the 2.4-million South Africans who say they are out of the workforce because they are “homemakers”, 2.1-million (or 88.2%) are women.

Baloyi said closing the gap would mean sharing that load more fairly. “Ultimately care must be redistributed from women alone to men, families, communities, the state and the private sector,” he said, adding that the most direct reforms to ease the burden on women are:

• affordable childcare and eldercare;
• stronger parental leave that encourages men to take on more care work;
• flexible working arrangements; and
• better enforcement of equal pay

Regarding unpaid care work, Davis-Buitendag said South African law does not currently treat it as something that deserves recognition or pay in its own right. Measures such as maternity leave and social security exist, she said, but they stop short of recognising the economic value of the caregiving itself.

“A woman who has to take care of children or elders does not have the same opportunity to pursue a career or earn income and cannot access legal protection against GBV, for example,” she said. “So while she may be equal in terms of the law, she still remains substantively unequal in her lived reality.”

The toll this takes on women’s safety, their access to support and on the children growing up in those households is still not being properly addressed, she said.

“As it is, the system reproduces inequality rather than addressing it.”

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