Many commentators have acknowledged South Africa’s commitment to the promotion and recognition of women. They have also reminded us that the challenge of pursuing equality is far from full achievement.
There are several facts that emphatically illustrate the remaining challenges. Of the 364 listed companies and state-owned enterprises in South Africa, only seven have women CEOs; and three out of every five have men-only boards. Although women account for 41% of South Africa’s workforce, only 15% of executive managers and just 7% of all directors are women.
In the Department of Education, the number of women in leadership positions has increased in the recent past. There are three women deputy directors-general out of five, and about a third of the chief directors and nearly a half of the directors in the Department of Education are women.
In the public education system nearly 70% of employees are women, but most of them are restricted to the lower levels of employment in our schools, colleges and universities. If there is a male member of staff in a primary school, he is almost always the principal.
The situation is worse in our secondary schools, where almost all principals and most heads of department are male. We have several women deputy vice-chancellors but only one woman vice-chancellor in our 22 universities. These are some of the challenges education must respond to.
In the area of accelerating the access and success of girls and women in educational institutions, we have made great progress. Black students and, in particular, black female students are now a majority at our universities.
The outstanding challenges relate to fields of studies and skewed ratios in several critical discipline areas. There are too many students studying the arts and too few in the sciences; too many undergraduates and too few postgraduates; and too many men and not enough women undertaking research in science, engineering and technology (SET).
Our challenges in the technical sciences begin in the schools. Even though we have more girls in the secondary phase than boys, performance in maths and science has shown little sign of improvement over the past 10 years.
The education sector has reacted by increasing the number of specialist schools in maths and science from 102 to more than 400. The curriculum has been redesigned to ensure increased proficiency in numeracy, and from 2006 all learners will study maths beyond the compulsory phase of schooling. These are necessary changes because South Africa will not advance and moder-nise if we do not improve our performance in maths and science. We also must attend to the critical area of technical skills development. Industry and formal education need to strengthen links and support the access of women students to work experience.
Curriculum reform is the foundation on which we will secure the participation of women and blacks in SET in the future. But we are already beginning to see progress: in 2003, black graduates accounted for two-thirds of the growth in SET graduates since 2000.
Clearly women have begun to make strides in all areas of skills development. We must strengthen technical skills development to ensure that women impact decisively on social and economic development in South Africa.
Naledi Pandor is the Minister of Education. This is an edited version of her address at the Women Creating Wealth Conference, held on August 11