National Planning Commission (NPC) commissioner Professor Viviene Taylor on Thursday said gender equality is essential, explaining that there is a need for political will at all levels, and adequate resources to implement plans to achieve women’s development.

Taylor was speaking during the NPC’s virtual engagement, launching the Technical Paper on women and gender.

The NPC is interested in assessing the changes in women’s development status and gender equality in South Africa, explaining that the Technical Paper aims to assist the commission in this respect.

The report provides empirical and statistical data on the progress made towards women’s emancipation in South Africa.

It highlights that, as in other countries, analysis of the data from the South African time use surveys reveals that women do far more unpaid care work than men. Men do more System of National Accounts (SNA) work than women, but the amount by which men’s SNA work exceeds women is less than the amount by which women’s unpaid care work exceeds that of men.

As a result, women tend to work longer total hours than men. In 2010 the value of the unpaid care work done predominantly by women would have added 30.4% to South Africa’s gross domestic product if unpaid care work had value imputed based on the median wage for all employees.

Taylor explained that gender differences are especially large in child care.

Women aged 30 to 49 years do nearly 57% of all unpaid care work in the economy and many of these women are lone mothers who provide for children materially and emotionally.

Taylor said unpaid care work was a key and recurring issue but received little attention and was key to understanding gender inequality and women’s disadvantage.

She said women and girls were not a homogenous group and the issues that influenced their emancipation and gender equality affected certain categories of women more than others.

Planning, therefore, has to be responsive to specific practical and strategic needs of differing groups of women, she added.

Meanwhile, she explained that government had policies, frameworks, laws and regulations in place to address some of this issues, however, implementation of these policies and laws was often lacking despite civil society actors challenging non implementation through the courts. Such challenges and successful court rulings have not always led to implementation.

South Africa was shaped by a colonial and neocolonial history, she explained, that drew on pre-existing social and economic systems whose survival and accumulation of benefits depended on producing divisions and inequalities.

“It is important to understand how these systems evolved over time to ensure that we are able to address the structural causes of women’s exploitation and inequalities and divisions in our society,” Taylor said.

Achieving Women’s Emancipation and Gender Equality

She explained that the lack of linkages between development planning, social conditions, the needs of women, and macroeconomic policy and planning must be addressed.

Also, the institutional fragmentation within government and between the different spheres of government must be addressed because this had a serious impact on how gender plans were implemented and monitored.

Taylor said future planning required a focus on engendering institutional arrangements within and outside of State systems, ensuring gender-redistributive policy, legislation and planning structures.