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#WomensMonth: women's economic empowerment is a human right, not a crisis management allowance

11 August 2023 | Story Prof Pearl Sithole | Photo Supplied

Opinion article by Prof Pearl Sithole, Social Scientist and Vice-Principal: Academic and Research on the Qwaqwa Campus, University of the Free State.

It is August and I want to bury my head in the sand to avoid being part of what is turning out to be a condescending South African ritual against women – ‘speak justice in August, and practise injustices for the rest of the year’. The requests to feminists to rise up and give talks to dignify yet another August with sophisticated speak about quite a simple moral matter – women are as human as men. The ritual is tiring and it is creating despondency. How difficult can it be to switch to action on equality and fairness towards women as human beings too? How difficult can it be to be fair? How difficult can it be to see that while the unfairness is structural and cultural, it is social will and moral agency that is called into test? And how difficult is it to realise that in fact not attending to this matter of social justice is keeping all the other architecture of inequalities and unfairness intact?

August in South Africa is used to pour out pity in the name of physical gender-based violence (GBV) and other social strains women experience – pity poured out by people who are in positions of power with voices that merely acknowledge what needs to be done. The same voices will then go to various corners where they practise professional GBV, and thus endorsing women as ‘secondary beings’ used to shoulder a patriarchal and capitalist societal agenda.

Economic empowerment of women

This year the focus is economic empowerment of women. In a government blog published in March 2023 that was written partly to cast a celebratory tone for International Women’s Day, the President could not resist twinning economic empowerment with the potential to escape GBV:

“The economic empowerment of women is an important pillar of our struggle to end gender-based violence and femicide. We have recognised that unequal access to resources and economic opportunity makes it more difficult for women to escape situations of abuse and violence.”

Clearly this is a much-needed spanner in the works to escape GBV. But the fact is that this society still laments a wage gap and pleads for narrowing gender economic differences in order to escape GBV, speaks volumes about the kind of society South Africa is. The institutional culture that sees women as secondary, almost like pets, must be given reprieve from violence even if it takes ‘giving them some economic empowerment’. The lack of transparency on pay scales across work categories; no women ever in certain leadership positions; and more women being unemployed – are not cited as a violation in themselves. Basically, South Africa is an abusive society to women that avoids the mirror by pretending to attend to physical violence through relaxing the rest of the violations.

Yet the more tokenistic the talk on inequalities every August and thus the endorsement of structural and cultural injustices, the firmer the country proclaims its affinity with inequality. If the maxim “actions speak louder than words” has been promulgated as useful with regards to socialisation and bringing up decent human beings, the current generation of leaders has failed dismally to use it in terms of political and social will to fight injustices.

Instead they have exercised a practical display that men are the superior species and that women must take charge of the menial affairs of society in daily life. The uproar against physical GBV masks the major omissions on the kind of society South Africa is while it continues to modernise gender inequalities:

Leadership is a male affair, with the top and resource-management positions exclusively male through history. The Presidency is a male affair, as well as the portfolios of Economic Development and Finance.
The business sector also continues to have higher pay grades for men and not for women.
In sport, women’s teams are paid less, with public scrounging just to lull the complaints for every major event.
Committees can recommend women into positions and authorities can exercise the right not to endorse those recommendations.
Institutions, including civil society, can legitimise their existence over the concept of social justice and sustain glaring imbalances on gender in leadership positions.
Funders continue to have gender and racial leadership preferences in agencies they fund – the rest of the profiles being the subject of never-ending training on funding proposals.
Intersectionality of identity becomes visibly toxic when certain members of ‘the inferior groups’ are given a special place on the ladder within the unequal society – like the conspicuous place of white women in the property sector, and the convenient tallying of all women to generate a good transformation profile for institutions.

Society has modernised inequality

In essence society has modernised inequality – and highlights ‘shallow permits’ as women’s rights achievements. South Africa may shout shallow things like: ‘our women can be car drivers’ and ‘women feature in the Constitution’, but the total lived experience of women at all levels of society leaves little to be desired. Men continue to hover over the prerogative to place women or ‘allow’ them in spaces where it makes strategic support to their own positions or to make institutions look good in terms of quotas.

In professional spaces in South Africa it is not uncommon to see very capable women doing menial tasks designed to hand over professional products for men to shine in leadership. It is almost like the domestication of professional spaces through importing culture and religion – to underpin institutional chauvinism. And yet policies and strategies make a clear and tacit association of culture and religion only with society out there. Beside gender mainstreaming, which is largely grounded on mere inclusion of women, the damaging role of culture and religion on professional relationships is not on the radar of attention within institutions. Thus, a country can marginalise women’s national teams on the issue of remuneration at the back of what is cited as “the best constitution in the world”, and still talk about the importance of women every August.

The most disappointing stakeholders in all this are the women’s political formations. In the context of South Africa, ageism within these formations is a huge factor. Those senior women are kingmakers of note. They believe in women as living to support men and are afraid to rock the boat for their own placement in professional peripheral positions. It would be interesting to hear them articulate their status of bondage and why it has been sustained.

For now, one thing is clear: just like other hegemonies that used ideology and culture to root themselves (i.e. imperialism, capitalism and racial inequalities), patriarchy is not going to disintegrate just because those it serves have suddenly developed a conscience and realise they are not ‘better beings’. Agency, advocacy, and political will are key in fighting for justice. No piece of paper implements itself, not even the Constitution.

News Archive

UFS receives R13,7 Million for Research into Prehistoric Organisms

2007-03-27

Some of the guests attending the launch of the research contract are: Dr Siyabulela Ntutela (Deputy Director: Biotechnology at the Department of Science and Technology), Dr Godfrey Netswera (Manager of Thuthuka and the Support Programme at the National Research Foundation (NRF)), Dr Esta van Heerden (Platform Manager and lecturer at the Department of Microbial, Biochemical and Food Biotechnology at the UFS), Mr Butana Mboniswa (Chief Executive Officer of BioPAD), and Mr Vuyisele Phehani (Portfolio Manager for BioPAD).
Photo: Leonie Bolleurs

The University of the Free State (UFS) has been awarded a massive R13,7 million contract to conduct research into prehistoric micro-organisms which live under extreme conditions, for example in mineshafts.

This is one of the biggest research contracts awarded to the UFS in recent years.

The biotechnology research contract was awarded to the UFS by BioPAD, a South African biotechnology company that brokers partnerships between researchers, entrepreneurs, business, government and other stakeholders to promote innovation and create sustainable biotechnology businesses.

The project is endorsed by the Department of Science and Technology and the National Research Foundation (NRF), which contributes to the bursaries of the 17 postgraduate students on the programme.

The contract involves the establishment of a Platform for Metagenomics - a technique which allows researchers to extract the DNA from microbes in their natural environment and investigate it in a laboratory.

“Through this platform we will be able to understand deepmine microbial populations
and their potential application in the search for life in outer space. It is most likely
that, if life were to be found on other planets in our solar system, it would probably
resemble that which existed millions of years ago on earth. Apart from all this, these
organisms have unique properties one can exploit in biotechnological application for
South Africa and its community,” said Dr Esta van Heerden, platform manager and
lecturer at the UFS Department of Microbial, Biochemical and Food Biotechnology.
She is assisted by her collegues, Prof. Derek Litthauer and Dr Lizelle Piater.

“The platform aims to tap into the unique genetic material in South African mines
which will lead to the discovery of new genes and their products. These new and unique products will find application in the medical field (anti-cancer, anti-bacterial en anti-viral cures), the industrial sector (nanotechnology, commercial washing agents and the food industry), environmental sector (pollution management, demolition of harmful metals and other toxic waste),” said Dr Van Heerden.

According to Dr Van Heerden, the Metagenomics Platforms stems from the Life in
Extreme Environments (LExEN) programme which was started in 1994 by Princeton
University in the United States of America (USA) in South African mines with grants
from among others the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and
the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA. Other international collaborators
on the project include Geosynec Consultants Inc. (USA), Oak Ridge National
Laboratory (USA), the University of Tennessee (USA) and in South Africa the
Universities of the Witwatersrand, North West and Limpopo and companies like BHP
Billiton, MINTEK and mining companies like Harmony, Gold Fields and AngloGold
Ashanti.

The research field laboratory of the Metagenomics Platform, which was situated in
Glen Harvey, was moved to the Main Campus of the UFS in Bloemfontein. “In this
way the university has become the central hub for all research programmes. We are
also the liaison between the LExEN programme and the various mining companies
involved,” said Dr Van Heerden. The new laboratory was introduced during the
launch of the research contract.

“Our decision to commit BioPAD to this project stems from the company’s commitment to advance human capacity development to strengthen South Africa’s research infrastructure. It is also part of our aim to create and protect intellectual property,” said Mr Butana Mboniswa, Chief Executive Officer of BioPAD.

Talking on behalf of the UFS senior management, Prof. Teuns Verschoor, Vice-Rector
of Academic Operations, said that the university shares the excitement to be part of
the exploration of unknown forms of life, the discovery of new genes and
their products and in applying newly gained knowledge to better understand our
universe.

Media release
Issued by: Lacea Loader
Assistant Director: Media Liaison
Tel: 051 401 2584
Cell: 083 645 2454
E-mail: loaderl@ufs.ac.za
27 March 2007

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