PEARL SITHOLE | Women's fight for justice can't be limited to August

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 endure injustice 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?

August in SA 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.

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.”

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.

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. The uproar against physical GBV masks the major omissions on the kind of society SA 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.

In essence society has modernised inequality – and highlights "shallow permits" as women’s rights achievements. SA 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 much to be desired.

In professional spaces in SA 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.

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 SA, ageism within these formations is a huge factor. Those senior women are kingmakers of note.

Agency, advocacy, and political will are key in fighting for justice. No piece of paper implements itself, not even the constitution.

• Prof Sithole is a social scientist and vice-principal: academic and research on the QwaQwa Campus of the University of the Free State