It should not surprise any thinking citizen that black women continue to be the biggest losers in the SA economy. The coronavirus pandemic has worsened this situation and victimised black working-class women even more than they were before.
Despite social grants, some fragmented empowerment initiatives and much lip service paid to the mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters and grandmothers who form the bedrock of SA, in financial terms (as well as in the absence of cogent ways to protect both their dignity and their physical wellbeing), black women are still the most abused, oppressed and deprived members of our society.
This was underlined yet again in Oxfam SA’s annual report on inequality, published yesterday.
The SA report is a country-focused follow-up to Oxfam International’s January 2020 report into global inequality, which resulted in a vigorous challenge put to the billionaires at Davos to relook at taxation of the mega-wealthy. One of the shock statistics quoted in the global report, which was backed up by sound data, is that the world’s richest 22 men have more money than all the women in Africa put together.
The world’s richest 22 men have more money than all the women in Africa put together.
The international report found that 42% of working-age women across the world survive outside the paid labour force, as opposed to 6% of men, mostly because of their unpaid care responsibilities.
Every day, women and girls around the world work for a combined 12.5 billion hours for free, according to the International Labour Organisation.
In rural and low-income areas (parts of SA are high on this list), women work for an average of 14 hours a day on unpaid care work, be that for their own children, other people’s children, the elderly, the community or their husband and his family. This is five times more care work than men do in the same under-advantaged areas, despite stratospheric unemployment rates for both genders.
Even more distressingly, in poverty-stricken areas young women are often co-opted into household and care work, frequently because the older members of the household are absent, dead or ill. Keeping these girls out of school widens the disparity between educational opportunities, such as they may be, that are available to men and women.
Yesterday’s SA-focused report reveals striking levels of structural inequality in our economy, in particular the ways in which this undermines black women’s participation in the labour market.
The unspoken acceptance of such extreme gender inequality has a knock-on effect when it comes to rape, femicide and other forms of unspeakable violence against the women of SA.
Raising the position of women — in the public consciousness, on the economic ladder and in the general shape of society — would undoubtedly help to alleviate gender-based violence.
Women are abused because (some) men think they do not count as human beings. Make them count and the abuse, even if it does not immediately cease, can be more effectively counteracted.
What we do about all these statistics and revelations is of course the most pressing question. The Oxfam report, combined with research by other public, private and civic organisations, unravels and exposes the systemic forms of oppression that are practised on women in SA. These reports all make recommendations as to how such evils cannot just be nipped in the bud but smashed at the root. We should take note.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.