Address by the Minister of Education Naledi Pandor at the National Youth Commission conference on Young Women and Development, Johannesburg

Women Chief Executives of companies
Non-governmental organisations working with HIV and AIDS
Members of the National Parliament and Gauteng Provincial Legislature
Mayor of Ekurhuleni and young women from all walks of life

It is a pleasure to be here today.

Let me begin by congratulating the National Youth Commission (NYC) on arranging this information-sharing event for young women during this special month of August.

August is women's month, a time to think of women of all races and classes who fought and fight for freedom, and all those who have worked for gender emancipation and equality.

We salute all those women and all the women who continue to strive for the true liberation of South Africa from inequalities based on gender discrimination.

In particular, we value the contribution that so many women have made to education during the dark years of apartheid and since the beginning of our democracy.

Women's month is not only a time to celebrate the courage and success of women, but it is also a time to reflect on our values and lifestyles today.

The curriculum in schools today seeks to promote positive values and principles as tools that young persons should use in their daily lives. Among these core values are the key principles elaborated in our Constitution equality, respect for human dignity, freedom of religion, association, and culture. Important too are rights such as the right to education, the right to health provision, the rights of children and the right to privacy. The invitation to me today requested that the recent regulations on managing teenage pregnancy should be the focus of my contribution. However, before proceeding to that subject I wish to reflect briefly on the progress of women and girls in education.

We are on the right course in terms of the empowerment and development of women. Women have acted as a collective in many areas that supported the transformation of their lives.

In union affairs, it is women leaders who focused on the most disadvantaged workers and fought vigorously for better conditions of work.

In political organisations, women leaders and members have often been the ones to place the gender agenda at the forefront of debate and action.

In the education sector, it is women who make up the majority of the work force. The education sector has begun to reveal fascinating progress for girls and young women. Today, new opportunities are available to girls and women.

Look at the evidence. There are more girls than boys in our schooling system, they are more likely to complete Grade 12 and to do better academically than boys.

In the higher education system, there have been significant changes in the race and gender profile of the student body in our institutions. The proportion of female students in the higher education system rose from 43% in 1993 to 54% in 2003.

However, while this is a positive shift, we must be aware of the inequalities that are masked by the overall statistics. It is a matter of serious concern that the spread of women students across different programme areas remains uneven, with women students clustered in the humanities and under-represented in science, engineering, technology, and in postgraduate studies.

While women students are well represented at undergraduate level in the life sciences (52% overall), there continues to be low participation of women in the mathematical sciences (42%), engineering (19%), computer science (35%). The overall representation of women in health sciences and in commerce has improved significantly and women participate in more or less equal numbers overall.

However, black women tend to be under-represented in most fields. (2002 figures) Of female university enrolments in doctoral studies in 2001, 65% were white women and of those who graduated in 2001, 76% were white women. If one looks at the doctoral enrolments of women in the natural sciences, 75% of these enrolments in 2001 were in the life and physical sciences, five percent in mathematical sciences and only two percent in computer science. The numbers of women enrolments in these areas are still considerably lower than those of men, and men are spread across a wider range of fields.

These statistics mirror the international situation for women in higher education and the under-representation of women in most fields of science and engineering, as well as at post-graduate level, is not unique to South Africa.

The overall percentage of women academic (instruction/research) staff in higher education institutions has grown from 35% in 1997 to 41% in 2003 and there has been significant growth in the numbers of women academics overall. However, women still make up only 17% of professors and are clustered in the ranks of lecturer and below, at which levels they outnumber men. In addition, women do not publish as much research as men. There are still very few women in the management echelons of universities.

These indications of progress and of challenges that remain are all the more reason for us to focus on the message of abstaining from early sexual activity � as you are aware, this is a key part of the Abstain, Be faithful and Condomise (ABC) campaign directed at HIV awareness.

The subject of early or teen pregnancy has received much attention lately. Our society has become concerned at the growing number of girls who become mothers while at school. It is important to state that the education sector does not have definitive statistics on this subject, but the figures we have begun to collect suggest extremely worrying trends.

I want to alert young women to the consequences of risky behaviour.

Schoolgirls today put themselves at risk when they get pregnant.

They put themselves at risk in two important ways. They put their health at risk, and they put their futures at risk.

First of all their health, the risk of sexually transmitted diseases is high. The consequences can be catastrophic. Then they also put their futures at risk.

We know that teenage mothers are less likely to finish school. And that means they are less likely than their friends or boyfriends to get a job. More than this, teenage mothers are likely to become single parents and to live in poverty. In turn this puts their children especially girl children, at risk, at risk of poor health and at risk of becoming teenage mothers themselves. And so the generational cycle turns and repeats itself.

Those are the personal risks.

But there is also a risk for society at large. When teenage mothers drop out of school, there is a risk to our social and economic fabric. Failure to finish matric is a major cost to our society and economy. We need to retain schoolchildren in school until they matriculate so that they are able to contribute to economic growth and our national project of development and transformation.

The consequences of risky teenage behaviour are huge, for all of us, well into the future.

The growing trend of young mothers puts at risk much of what we have achieved over the past thirteen years for the empowerment of women. Despite our educational success, women are more unemployed than men. Since 2001, when it was first conducted, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) has consistently recorded a higher unemployment rate among women, compared to men. The most recent data, recorded in the September 2006 LFS, reports an official unemployment rate of 21,2% for men, compared to 30,7% among women.

What more do women need to do about this inequality?

The 1998 Nobel laureate for economics, Amartya Sen, had this to say about African women in general � he was comparing India with Africa in talking about his 2005 book Argumentative Indian. Despite the massive economic growth in India in recent time, half of Indian children are chronically under-nourished. He was asked why India was unable to feed its poor.

His answer was this: "I think (India) goes wrong in two respects. One, even though Africa has famines, higher mortality rates and much more chaos, the issue of eating enough is quite a big issue in Africa. The African rebellious spirit is stronger. The other reason is, women are much more important in Sub-Saharan Africa, they have a much bigger voice. We know, within India, whenever women have had a bigger voice; the hunger problem has dramatically reduced. The fact that gender inequality is far less in Africa is not unrelated to the fact that regular hunger is also far less in Africa than in India."

Women need to have "a much bigger voice" in our country.

The struggle continues. We have not yet been admitted into paradise. Women are still the victims of sexual and violent abuse. Women are still abused belittled and humiliated within marriage.

So we lag behind in the work place and at home, but we are reaching for gender equality in education. Widening access to education has been one of the key thrusts of education reform since 1994. We have widened access and opportunity to young women whose parents were excluded by decades of racial and gender discrimination.

However, we as a society have some way to go in truly achieving gender equity in terms of eradicating those factors that continue to impede the advancement of women.

And one of those factors is teenage pregnancy, it prevents far too may schoolgirls from completing school. The pregnancy management measures are as a result of detailed discussions within my department and with my provincial colleagues. These measures encourage teenagers to abstain from sex, but they also provide a framework for the management of schoolgirl pregnancies.

They emphasise that pregnant schoolgirls have a right to education and cannot be expelled from school because they are pregnant, but they also set out guidelines for managing pregnancies so that the learning environment for other learners is not compromised.

Parents and guardians have a critical role to play in teaching their children about the risks of early pregnancies.

I want to conclude on this note. I cannot emphasise too much the importance of parenting. Young people seldom think of the joys and responsibilities of parenting when they are confronted by pregnancy.

Long gone are the days when fathers play no role in bringing up children. We have a particular legacy in this regard to overcome, a legacy of family dislocation brought on by a century and more of the migrant-labour system.

So boys should think long and hard about the consequences of teenage pregnancy. They should think long and hard about care and support and not leave women in a family to do the work.

Parents and the home environment they create are the single most important factor in shaping a child's well-being, achievements and prospects. Government is keen to encourage men to take responsibility for their children. Teenage fathers should spend as much time with their children as possible, if their children are to be given a good start in life.

Unmarried fathers have a parental responsibility for their children. Many teenage fathers do not realize this and do not know this.

Finally, the measures are designed to assist teachers with guidelines for supporting learners who become pregnant. They assert the right to education. They create room for the parents to choose to care for their child. Most important, and unusual, they refer to the right of the child to receive care.

I would welcome the support of the Youth Commission in a joint campaign to alert young people to the importance of 'ABC' in their daily lives.

Issued by: Department of Education
30 August 2007