The ‘Martha Effect’
The potential value of women to the South African economy was set out in a working paper by Nic Spaull and Hendrik van Broekhuizen, ‘The “Martha Effect”: The compounding female advantage in South African higher education’.10 They found that:
- In South Africa (as in most parts of the world), girls are streets ahead of boys academically.
- By Grade 4, girls are a full academic year ahead of boys in learning and by Grade 5 they are 40% ahead of boys in maths.
These superior results continue into high school and university. It turns out that women are at a distinct advantage, even though they start on an equal footing at the start of the educational process. The study controlled for factors such as race, age, socio-economic status, home province and institutions attended. This was what it found at tertiary education level:
- 27% more women than men qualified for university
- 34% more enrolled in university
- 56% more completed their undergraduate education
- 66% more attained a bachelor’s degree
Out of the 19 fields of study examined, it appears that women are more likely to choose to specialise in 12 of those fields. Five fields were identified as being less likely to produce degreed women candidates. But this is not due to lower completion rates – it’s simply that women don’t tend to enter those areas.
In all fields, women are 20% less likely to drop out than men.
The study suggests one reason we may be seeing these results is that ‘girls have better non-cognitive skills such as self-control, selfmotivation, dependability, sociability, perceptions of self-worth, locus of control, time preference and delayed gratification’. There are other arguments that suggest the school system tends to reward the kind of ‘good behaviour’ that girls exhibit. Perhaps a bigger story we may be missing is that the education system as a whole is not developing the right skill sets for the workplace.
Van Broekhuizen and Spaull argue that the long-term effects of the global female advantage at school are likely to become more acute over time, particularly as the premium for higher education seems to be growing as we move to a knowledge-based economy. More importantly, this trend should have important implications for how society as a whole evolves. We need to start giving far more thought to that point.
They end their study with this particularly telling quote: The quiet revolution of women’s roles, as Claudia Goldin (2006) calls it, is arguably a close rival to new technologies in terms of the seismic aftershocks touching directly and indirectly, all major social institutions. And like its rivals, it has not yet come to full maturation. Incomplete revolutions tend to be associated with major disequilibria.11
How well are we doing?
The reality is that we’ve made little progress in capitalising on what we know about the performance of women academically and in the workplace. In fact, research from McKinsey, Mercer and Grant Thornton12 suggests we are actually going backwards – both globally and in South Africa.
Women in work
Let’s look at the facts for South Africa:
- Women in South Africa get paid 15% to 17% less than men for the exact same work.13
- Only 28% of the senior management roles available are held by women (Grant Thornton claim that’s only a 2% increase from the start of their research 13 years ago, and even that minute increase might just be due to sampling variations). This is somewhat better than the global average of 25% but lower than the best regions, such as Eastern Europe, at 38%.14
- One-third of South African companies have no women in management at all (again, at 31%, this is slightly better than the global average of 34%; however, in Eastern Europe only 9% of companies have no women in senior management).
- The number of women CEOs in South Africa increased from 7% in 2015 to 10% in 2017. The common senior roles women tend to hold are in human resources and finance.
- In the public sector, women make up 40.5% of senior management of state-owned enterprises and have a 42.3% representation in parliament. The private sector has lagged woefully.
According to Grant Thornton, one of the factors that seems to be distracting management’s attention from gender equality is compliance with B-BBEE targets. This seems to be the natural by-product of the fact that B-BBEE targets are legislated. There are no legislated quotas for women in the workplace in South Africa, which is perhaps understandable given the higher imperative for transformation.15
Mercer’s 2017 update on its ongoing study for the World Economic Forum (WEF), When Women Thrive, Businesses Thrive, paints an even bleaker picture of regression globally. Not only are organisations failing to build effective pipelines for future female talent, but slow (or no) changes in hiring, promotion and retention rates means that, at the current rate of change, the economic gender gap will not be closed for another 170 years – 52 years longer than projected in the WEF’s 2015 report.16
Meeting the challenges presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution compounds the problem. Many women are currently employed in traditionally ‘female’ jobs that will be vulnerable to automation – office administrators, call centre agents and cashiers, for example. Office administration, to take one example, is expected to lose roughly 10 times the number of jobs as those areas expected to see the highest job creation. Moreover, three of the five high-growth job categories – management, computers and maths, and architecture and engineering – are under-represented by women today and are unlikely to provide much opportunity for women in the near term.
Mercer’s When Women Thrive: Financial Services Perspective, released in October 2016, pointed out that financial services organisations are increasingly hiring more men than women at almost every level of the organisation. This will clearly widen the representation gap even further. Financial services companies also appear to be promoting more men at every level of the organisation, while women executives are exiting at a higher rate – and at substantially higher rates than they are being hired. If left unchanged, these talent flows (hiring, promotions and retention) will decrease women’s representation at the top of organisations from 15% to 12% by 2025.17
Oliver Wyman’s 2016 report, Women in Financial Services, came to similar conclusions. It analysed 381 financial services organisations globally, including South Africa, and found that, at the current rate of progress, executive committees in the industry globally will reach 30% women representation in 2046. The low representation of women on executive committees is a particular problem, because this is where key strategic decisions are made.18
Confronting the problem
What’s remarkable from the data and insights is: Do we truly understand what causes women to shift from being ahead of men academically to being behind in terms of compensation and job opportunities?
Outdated social norms may be at the heart of the gender gap
Research on gender equality in South Africa is extensive and unequivocal. If gender inequality may be embedded in corporate policy and processes in relation to human capital management, it persists because it is also implicitly, and often explicitly, entrenched in the broader cultural mores, in government policies and the interpersonal relationships of our lives.19
Cass Sunstein defines social norms as attitudes of approval or disapproval, held by a specific society, that specify what should or shouldn’t be done at any given time.20 Sunstein is of the view that there are social norms about every aspect of human behaviour and we can never escape them. When we behave in ways that are inconsistent with social norms, we may suffer public disapproval or social ostracism. Social norms are therefore both enabling and constraining, as they determine what is appropriate behaviour in a given situation.21
Since organisations are social structures, they are characterised by social norms. According to Jon Elster,the workplace is a hotbed for norm-guided behaviour because many norms tend to be role-specific.22 For instance, there are norms associated with being a doctor, lawyer, teacher, student, friend, wife, husband, junior employee and senior employee.
In 2017, researchers from Bain & Company conducted a comprehensive study among professionally employed men and women in South Africa to understand the personal, societal and organisational factors that hinder women’s progress in the workplace. The study provides evidence that the problem is not at a personal level for women but may be at a societal and organisational level, highlighting potentially outdated social norms that work against women in the workplace.
The researchers discovered that there is no difference in the confidence levels and aspirations of men and women when they start out their careers. Both men and women believe they can reach top management. Table 3.6.1. compares the confidence levels of women and men at different levels in an organisation.
According to the study, both men and women believe in gender equality in the workplace – but for different reasons. Common reasons given for this belief were ‘moral imperative’ and ‘business legislation’. Only 20% of men and 21.5% of women gave ‘business imperative’ as their reason. Among executives, the ‘business imperative’ reason was chosen by 38% of women and 24% of men. Since business environments are supposedly rational and driven by economics and performance, it is important to articulate the link between representation by women at senior levels and stronger business performance, as this will motivate appropriate action to increase representation by women in the workplace.24
Figure 3.6.5, adapted from the Bain & Company study on the state of gender equality in South Africa, identifies the extent to which these different dynamics can affect women in the workplace from a societal, organisational and personal perspective.