By Zarina Maharaj

The choice of South Africa Women's Day by PWL Investments to set up a forum for professional and business women to interact and add value to KwaZulu Natal's economy and thereby the national economy underscores the fact that it sees itself as part of the forces for change.

Today's launch of this forum, the Professional Women's League, is an important step towards women occupying the space for our advancement promised in the Bill of Rights and in the gender-sensitive laws and policies that are replacing those which prior to 1994 took no account of the need to empower women.

I am therefore honoured to have been invited to make the keynote address.

What the Professional Women's League does to occupy this space is at the cutting edge of making change a reality. In this sense it needs to see and conduct itself as part of the advance forces of activists working towards gender equality. This is the last Women's Day of the last decade of this century and of this millennium This last decade of the 1990s in SA is destined to be stamped in history with two outstanding achievements. One is the birth of a constitutional state and multiparty democracy based on one-person-one-vote. The other is the constitutional commitment to eliminating discrimination in our country, particularly the racial and gender discrimination responsible for the gross inequalities that divide and haunt us as a nation.

One such inequality is in income. South Africa has one of the largest income inequalities in the world. The average income of the richest 20% of South African households, largely white, is 45 times more than the average income of the poorest 20% of households, largely black and mostly African. 10% of the richest South Africans earn in excess of 50% of the country's economic wealth, measured by the Gross Domestic Product or GDP, while 40% of the poorest earn less than 6% of GDP. President Thabo Mbeki last year stated that this yawning gap between rich and poor coincides with the existence of two nations in South Africa, a small white one and a large black one. Closing this gap by removing income inequality is a necessary condition of nation-building.

Where do women fit into this picture of income inequality? The majority of the nation's poor are women. Of these, rural African women, whose incomes are mainly from pensions and remittances from relatives, are the majority of the poorest of the poor, defined as those belonging to households which fall in the poorest 20% of South African households with an income of between R400 and R700 per month.. According to Statistics SA (SSA), which has compared the incomes of households headed by women with those of households headed by men, over 37% of women-headed households in non-urban areas fall in the category of the poorest 20% of households in the country, as compared with 23% of male-headed households in non-urban areas. In urban areas, 15% of women-headed households are among the poorest 20% of households, as compared with 5% of male-headed households there.

Gender disparities in income is a structural feature of societies the world over. As the UN puts it " Women are over half the world's people, one third of the official workforce and do two-thirds of the world's work-hours. Yet they receive only one-tenth of the world's income and own less than one-hundredth of the world's property."

Apart from inequalities in income, there are other racial and gender inequalities . In SA there is glaring unequal access to social resources like land, healthcare, credit, information, education and decision-making power between the races and between the sexes. I will be discussing some of these. It is these inequalities that create and reinforce the power relations in society, white domination of blacks on the one hand and male domination of females on the other.

What unites us as South African women across the diversity of our race, religion and socio-economic status is that we do not enjoy the same access as the men in our social groups to our country's resources. But precisely how male domination and female subordination in society play out in South Africa and how it affects our particular experiences and the quality of our lives, differs sharply according to whether we are white, African, Coloured or Indian. It is African women who make up the majority of those suffering the experiences of being poor; it is rural African women who make up the majority of the poorest of the poor , those who do not have enough to eat.

Male domination arising from such inequalities is reflected in the rapes, femicides and other sexual violence affecting mostly poor women that have today reached such crisis proportions. One in every three women in SA is in an abusive relationship, a woman is killed by her partner every six days and there is a rape every 35 seconds. No wonder we are the rape capital of the world! This is now being seen as a national disaster requiring emergency measures. Let us for a moment remember, with South African women across the country, the victims of sexual violence, murder and assault.

Such violence, which, is putting an enormous strain on health facilities and costing the economy millions of rands each year, is being nurtured by gender inequalities which make women poorer than men. I will discuss some of these here.

Let me start with the inequality in the wages of men and women in the formal sector of the economy, the sector whose goods and services are counted in calculations of the GDP. This discussion is based on a study by Carolyn Winter, the results of which were shared with women activists by Judith Edstrom when she was in SA with the World Bank..

The educational attainment of the South African population varies by race from an average of under six years for Africans and Coloureds to eight years for Indians and almost ten years for whites. But surprisingly it is relatively equal for both men and women, compared with many countries, where men have more schooling than women

Of those in the labour force, women have an average of 1,2 years more education than men. Globally, years of education is a predictor of occupation and occupation is a predictor of wage levels. We would therefore expect that South African women would do reasonably well on the remuneration front, especially in professional and technical employment where 21% of economically active women are represented as compared with only 12% of economically active men. This strong showing of women in the professional and technical fields lies partly in their orientation towards teaching and nursing.

However, South African women's wages average only 87% of men's in the formal labour force. The breakdown by race presents a further surprise: African women's wages are actually identical to African men's. But African women average two more years of education than African men. On this basis their salaries should be 20% more. Moreover, white women's salaries average 67% of white men's despite having equal educational attainment. Coloured women's educational advantage over men also fails to translate into a wage advantage. Indian women do not have an educational advantage over Indian men so their lower salaries in relation to their menfolk does not irk as much.

In terms of ratings on a scale for other middle-income countries like Brazil and Venezuela, South African women can surprisingly be proud of their educational achievements. Also, their formal labour force participation is higher relative to men's participation than in these other countries (although in absolute terms the participation rate of South African women is less than half of that of these Latin American women). Such facts make wage discrimination here even less acceptable. Women's wages do not reflect their human capital. And simply because of their sex.

As is to be expected, the average hourly earnings of all women employees across both the formal and informal sectors (and this includes domestic workers) is also less than that of men employees. According to gender statistics produced by Statistics South Africa (SSA), African women's earnings average 89% of African men's; white women's average 60% of white men's; Indian women's average 74% of Indian men's; and Coloured women 's earnings average 82% of Coloured men's.

There are also statistics revealing inequalities in levels of employment, levels of education, decision-making positions, access to health facilities and so on. But I will not go into these here. Instead, I want to turn to a very useful single measure of the overall extent of gender inequality in a country. It is a measure used by the UNDP, which devised it, for comparing the levels of gender inequality both in different countries and at different stages in the development of one country.

This measure is based on the UNDP's so-called Human Development Index, HDI for short. The HDI allows countries to be ranked in order of their human or social development. In extracting the indicators needed to calculate the HDI, the UN asked: what are the basic capabilities that people must have to participate in and contribute to the devlopment of their society? The answer was: an ability to lead a long and healthy life, to be knowledgeable and to have access to the resources needed for a decent standard of living. These factors translate into a society's life expectancy at birth; its level of educational attainment; and the income regarded as adequate for a decent standard of living. The HDI measures a country's achievement in providing these basic capabilities to its population as a whole.

Now when such achievement in basic capabilities is measured for only the women of a population, it is called the Gender Development Index or GDI. The difference between the HDI and the GDI thus amounts to a measure of the gender inequality in these basic capabilities - capabilities which impact on a person's access to the rest of society's resources. As such, the difference between the HDI and the GDI is an indicator of the overall gender difference in access to society's resources, an indicator of the overall gender inequality in a nation.

I have used this measure in previous writings about women's situation in society and have introduced a name for it because it is so useful. I have called it GIM, the Gender Inequality Measure, not previously named (GIM is not to be confused with GEM, which is an indicator of the decision-making power of women).

If you look at the HDI and GDI of South Africa for 1996, 1997 and 1998, you will find GIM has steadily been increasing. This means growing gender inequalities in SA, in spite of some women's empowerment efforts already having taken off. The increase in GIM can be explained by gender inequalities in life expectancy implied by the higher rate at which women are becoming HIV-infected relative to men. More than 90% of South Africans with Aids are Africans, mainly aged between 15 and 40. Over two thirds of these are women, whose infection rate is escalating faster than men's.

The rate of infection is greatest among people between 15 and 25, the majority of them African, with girls and young women especially at risk: for every one male that is infected, two females are. In fact, while a third more South Africans have contacted the virus since 1997, there is a shocking 65% increase in the rate of infection of women of all races aged between 15 and 19. And a 40% increase since 1997 amongst women as a whole.

The huge costs to the economy, direct and hidden, is a topic in itself, which time does not allow me to discuss.

The increase in GIM is also explained by the trend of women's incomes falling more rapidly than men's to below the poverty line. Globally, it has been established that 50% more women as compared with 30% more men have become income-impoverished over the last few years. This is the so-called 'feminisation of poverty'. It is not surprising that poverty is becoming more feminised in SA, given the macro-economic context, the rationalisation of the public service where women dominate as teachers and nurses and the current effects of globalisation on poor people's incomes, especially women's. I will touch on globalisation and women later.

Let us look at this growing inequality in South Africa picked up by GIM from the point of view of its effect on the economy. I will show that such inequality is bad for the economy because it stifles the contribution women make to social development and economic growth.

In an article in a 1997 issue of Agenda, a South African women's journal, the economist Dori Posel discusses her research on the expenditure patterns of households in SA. She has found that households headed by women spend more income on the nutritional needs of children than male-headed households. And that if consumption patterns in male-headed households were to mirror those in female-headed households, the incidence of malnutrition in SA would fall by at least 12%. She found also that women, even in households that they share with men, tend to spend more on children on items other than food. Unlike men, who even in poor households withhold income for personal consumption of things like beer and cigarettes, women's income is more tied up with the collective needs of the family. A woman would be more likely than a man to spend her overtime pay or bonus on something like a winter coat or school fees for her child.

Such evidence is telling. An income in the hands of a woman has a bigger multiplier effect in terms of greater benefits to child health and family welfare and education than the same income in the hands of a man. Put differently, women's incomes go further towards household survival and human capital investment than men's.

This finding is backed by research in other countries. In Bangladesh, for example, very poor women with no collateral who have received small loans from the Grameen Bank (a bank specialising in loans to very poor women) have been able to start tiny enterprises which generate an income for them. Spinoffs from this income include a greater decision-making role for these women in the family, open discussion with their husbands of family violence, abuse and sexually transmitted diseases , better-educated children, control of family size, and better health access for the family. Moreover, after 7 to 10 years of receiving annual successive loans from the Grameen Bank because of timely repayments, these women , once close to starvation, are able to provide 1800 calories a day of food to each member of their families. International studies of this nature abound.

Because women spend a greater proportion of their income on family nutrition and welfare than men, raising their incomes amounts to accelerating poverty alleviation and the quality of life of their families more rapidly than doing the same for men. This means quicker improvements in productivity and economic output .

But spinoffs via the family to the economy have been found to come not just from improving the income generating prospects of women. Improving women's health and education has been found to be another cost-effective route to growing the economy.

A World Bank report entitled 'Enhancing Women's Participation in Economic Development' starts from the premise that economic development is best served when scarce public resources are invested where they yield the highest social and economic returns. It shows, on the basis of worldwide studies that it has carried out , that such returns are, on the whole, greater for women than for men.

For example, in countries where modern agricultural technologies have been introduced, returns on an additional year of women's education range from 2% to 15%, more than the returns for the same educational investment in men. Policy experiments in Kenya suggest that primary schooling for women agricultural workers raises their agricultural yields by as much as 24%.

Improving women's educational levels also lowers fertility and slows population growth, which is a return central to sustainable development. Better educated women also means a reduction in infant mortality. It was found that even with an extremely poor country with a GDP per person of $300 , a doubling of female secondary school enrolments reduced the infant mortality rate from 105 deaths to 78 deaths per 1000 live births. .

Such a drop is greater than that achieved by direct health interventions that cost the same as doubling the secondary school attendance for girls. In developing nations like ours, children of educated mothers perform better on pre-school tests and daughters of educated mothers hold fewer stereotypical sex attitudes than do daughters of non-literate mothers. Moreover, the school participation rates of rural girls increase far more when their mothers' education changes from none to primary level than when their father's education changes in this way.

There are also significant payoffs to development when scarce resources are invested in the health of women. Take one example. It has been found that public spending to improve the healthcare for adult women aged between 15 and 44 - women of reproductive age - offers a bigger return on healthcare spending than for any other population group of adults. The major causes of disability and death of women of this age worldwide include illnesses associated with pregnancy and childbirth, respiratory infections and anaemia, TB, STD's and AIDS. All six of these illnesses can either be prevented or treated for less than a $100 per woman for a year of healthy life gained. For men on the other hand, only 3 out of the 10 illnesses afflicting them can be prevented or treated for less than a $100.

Similar analyses are still to be made in SA, but the statistics disaggregated by gender required for such studies are already coming together. Statistics on Aids together with others such as those in the SSA booklet 'Women and Men in South Africa' constitute a baseline for such analyses as well as for measuring and monitoring progress in women's access to various resources from year to year. As such gender statistics are a tool for monitoring progress in the empowerment of women.

Such findings by the World Bank provide overwhelming evidence for what is becoming received wisdom in economists' circles: that investing in women's education, health and income-generating opportunities strongly contribute to an improved quality of life of a nation and to poverty alleviation, thus providing a more cost-efficient route to economic growth and human capital development than if this growth were left to men alone.

This is why empowerment and economic growth need and feed each other. This is why empowerment aimed at the equality of women is a catalyst for economic growth. This is why women's issues are issues of social justice as well as of economics.

Perhaps those reluctant to support the cause of gender equality in SA will change their minds when they realise that their pockets are affected by this issue: the bigger the national cake, the bigger all our slices, men's and women's. If nothing else will persuade them, men have an economic stake in women's well-being. Gender discrimination stunts our economic growth and everyone's development.

Among the factors underlying the growth of gender inequality in SA is globalisation. This has recently been described by the secretary-general of the UN commission on trade and development as " driven by enterprises seeking profits wherever they can earn them in a ruthless competitive drive, which ignores borders and seeks to exploit all available sources of competitiveness - be they labour costs, capital costs, raw material costs… or other factors - in whatever markets they choose to compete". Yet the up-side of globalisation is that it provides a "window of opportunity for improving living standards, eliminating poverty, promoting environmental sustainability and moving along an accelerated path of development".

But such opportunities have only been realised where those countries opting for export-led economic growth, the most famous being the now toothless 'Asian Tigers', had adequate technological capacity, entrepeneurial, managerial, marketing and technical skills, long-tern finance and a solid transport infrastructure. Again, empowerment of all South Africans is necessary if we are to thrive in the global economy.

A female workforce provided the cheap labour that that drove Asia's export-led economic boom of the past decade. Female labour is cheap throughout the world, especially in SA .Under globalisation, footloose capital is free to seek it out. Recent research by the feminist economist Diane Elson has found that countries such as Pakistan - where women have not been free to enter the workforce - have benefited less from growth opportunities presented by trade liberalization than have countries like Bangladesh - where thousands of women have entered factories producing garments for export.

Unifem, the United Nations Development Fund, notes that while this rapid growth has provided many new jobs for women, they are badly paid, working conditions are appalling and there are few benefits and rights for them. But even these conditions are better than jobless poverty. Yet women have a precarious hold on these jobs: companies like Nike, for example, move from country to country depending on where they can find the cheapest labour, leaving thousands of women suddenly unemployed.

Globalisation has dealt a blow to jobs in SA in the form of cheap imports that are minimally taxed, if at all. Thousands of textile and clothing formal sector workers, predominantly women, have already lost their jobs because of cheaper imports.

Across the globe, women are always the worst hit by trade liberalisation including trading in money on financial markets which led to the crash of the Asian economies. The contagious negative effects of this crash on the economies of the rest of the world have dominated economic analysis over the past two years.

In Asia itself women were the worst affected by the upward trend in unemployment due to the forced closure of large firms and thousands of small and medium ones.. This is because they are the majority of owners and workers in small and medium enterprises and because they predominate in garments and electronics, which were the worst affected industries, as Marilyn Carr of the UN Development Fund (Unifem) reminds us. Asian governments have had to cut their subsidies on basic commodities to cope with the financial crisis. This has led to price increases which have directly affected women, who are the ones who balance household budgets, something made even more difficult by their loss of income.

Cutbacks on expenditure in social services have also hit Asian women hardest in their capacity as the primary caregivers to the elderly, the sick and the young in their families and communities. In SA women too have suffered disproportionately from such cutbacks. The government decision just announced two days ago to increase social spending on job creation, infrastructural development and poverty relief from from R500 million to R1,5 billion a year by 2001-2002 must be welcomed, provided the focus is firmly on improving the lives of women

Again, the South African government and many NGO's are actively supporting women to start and run small businesses in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy to cope with what is a global trend of growing unemployment. Of the economically active population, only 24% of African women are employed compared with 43% of African men and 69% of white men, for example.

Yet even these small enterprises will fail if they find themselves unable to compete with cheap imported products.

A major challenge as we enter the new millennium is thus upon us: it to find a kind of globalisation that would support stable lives and create a world free from gender-based poverty. This challenge is to change the globalisation process, where 20% of humanity controls 85% of the world's income and the bottom 20% survives on only $1,45 a day. "We need to go back to the basics, rethink how markets and states best interact to improve human life chances and how people can build their power, as well as skills to hold both the global market and their states accountable" says Noeleen Heyzer of Unifem.

To reach emerging markets and beat competition, South African women need to identify and produce the right products and get them to the right markets. The Department of Trade and Industry is helping to link women with these markets. So are many NGOs including the Small Enterprise and Get Ahead foundations.

At the international level, organisations like Unifem have been undertaking a series of international market research investigations on behalf of rural women producer groups. These include shea-nut collectors in West Africa, fish processors in South East Asia, and gum collectors in Africa and India. Unifem is also working with the SADC along these lines.

Women also need equal access to credit, training, and market information - resources traditionally open to men. Micro-finance institutions, those prepared to lend to borrowers without collateral, and telecentres, aimed at providing access to market and other information to those even in the remotest rural areas of SA, have a critical role to play in this regard. The lack of such access has pushed women into easy-entry, low-return economic activities like street vending.

In this global age, a vision of economic upliftment cannot ignore making new communications technologies accessible to the majority. Harnessing technology and the information superhighway is central to realising this vision. A development economist puts it this way "Low-cost telecommunications and information systems are simply not luxuries for developing countries in today's world. On the contrary, they are strategic factors of production central to the development process and to poverty reduction…Development is above all about information and knowledge…"

Such thinking has been influenced by the results of studies over the past twenty years carried out in the rural expanses of Canada, certain Nordic countries and others in Europe. These results have established that telecommunications usage (particularly telephones, telexes and fax machines) for such activities as managing rural enterprises and marketing crafts and agricultural products has increased the ratio of benefits to costs from 5:1 to more than 100:1 due to savings in time, travel costs and easier accessibility to marketing and other relevant information.

The use of communications technologies, including the 5-year old Internet, is expected to produce at least such a leap in efficiency in SA not only in enterprises, but also in such areas as literacy training, training in computer skills, and delivery of health, education and other social services. The impact of such a leap in efficiency on revenues and growth are expected to be dramatic.

This is why pilot telecentres, which offer various mixtures of telecommunications services made up from access to telephones, fax machines, typing, photocopiers, printing equipment and computers, have been set up in SA. Training packages include the basics of PC's, wordprocessing, e-mail, literacy training especially for women because they make up the majority of illiterate South Africans; as well as training on how to set up and run a small enterprise. These initiatives are focussed on improving rural people's access to and use of telecentres, especially women and the youth. They are intended to redress inequalities in information access between rural and urban people, black and white and male and female. The success of telecentres that promote the inclusion of otherwise excluded people into the national and global economy is crucial to realising the goal of eradicating poverty and the vision of an African Renaissance.

To conclude: As SA sheds the legacy of its iniquitous past into a future founded on social justice and equality, there are 1001 issues clawing for attention. But there are real resource and capacity constraints which limit giving each one of them the attention they deserve. It is therefore critical that from this multitude of issues a set of priorities be extracted that will deliver efficiently on the goal of the upliftment of our society. I have tried to show why the empowerment of women is one such priority issue - advancing social justice through gender equality has an economic spinoff: it accelerates social and economic development.

What does this mean for policymakers? It means taking women into account in the formulation of every policy, focussing on the impact it will have on the quality of women's lives and thereby on the entire fabric of society. At the level of government such a focus has led to every piece of legislation - whether it deals with land, water, telecentres, small business or equal employment opportunities -being processed with a gender-sensitive eye.

Government budgetary policy, the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), which makes three-yearly budgetary allocations on the basis of socio-economic priorities, allows for changes in the way government departments use their allocations on the basis of reprioritisations that deliver on constitutional and legislative promises, including gender equality. The MTEF has thus created a space not available under the previous budgetary system to push for budgetary allocations to improve the quality of women's lives.

This is why the Women's Budget Initiative is so important. It helps government departments allocate their budgets in a way that takes into account the empowerment of women in a trade-off against other constitutional priorities. This alone tells us we are on the road to gender equality.

But it is a long road, with many challenges still looming. Building on the constitutional and legal foundations laid down in this last historic decade of the 20th century is a challenge that all patriotic South Africans must rise to.

PWL investments, with its new forum for professional and business women, must be creative and innovative about finding and implementing policies that deliver on the empowerment of women, especially poor women. Your track record to date shows you are well-poised to take on this challenge.

We make our lives by what we give. Together let us give of our best to the cause of empowering women across the social spectrum and so add value to our society and our economy. Thank you.

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