Even though South Africa has one of the most progressive constitutions as far as promoting gender equality goes, it still had some way to go in closing the gap between policy statements and the actual implementation thereof, influential female speakers said on Tuesday.

Speaking at a Business Unity South Africa (Busa) conference, the South African Reserve Bank Governor Gill Marcus said that while the country had made great strides in numerically reaching targets in terms of the empowerment of women, the larger part of the female workforce was still in lower paid and less skilled positions.

Currently, 51,3% of the country’s population is women, and they constitute 44,8% of its labour force.

Marcus noted that even when women were holding more senior positions, they were often not able to leverage the power of their position to the fullest extent, owing to a number of stigmas and conventions.

Nevertheless, South Africa boasted 19,3% women in senior positions, compared with 14,4% in the US and 8% in Australia.

World Bank country director Ruth Kagia said that while South Africa had done exceptionally well in reaching numerical targets set out by policy, it still had to deal with significant challenges as far as social, cultural and religious orthodoxies were concerned.

“While the country has done very well in closing the gender gap, ranking an impressive sixth out of 134 countries in the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index, it is struggling with very high rates of violence against woman and HIV numbers,” she noted.

Kagia said that it was crucial that new policies, such as those proposed by the New Growth Path (NGP) and Vision 2025, would support women, especially the poor and those living in rural areas.

“The NGP hopes to create an additional five-million jobs within the next decade, and it is important that women proportionally benefit from this initiative.

“As well as benefit from their share of the R10-billion jobs fund as announced by President Jacob Zuma.”

Busa president Futhi Mtoba said that the forum on Tuesday would be the first of many similar events that would be used to formulate two documents around the participation of women in NGP and the Vision 2025, that would be developed by the National Planning Commission.

The documents would be submitted to Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel and head of the National Planning Commission, Minister Trevor Manual in September.

“Women empowerment would be central to the higher inclusive growth that these two policies are striving towards,” said Mtoba.

“Forget about China, forget about globalisation and the Internet, going forward, the world’s economic force will be driven by women, who are also the gateway to family welfare,” added Kagia.