Turning Gender Rights into Entitlements: Women and Welfare Provision in Postapartheid South Africa

Shireen Hassim Turning Gender Rights into Entitlements: Women and Welfare Provision in Postapartheid South Africa THE TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AFRICA WAS MARKED BY THE extent to which women mobilized to ensure that the new political system would be accessible to women’s participation and that policy outcomes would be gender equitable.’ Arguments for gender equality were pursued in tandem with those for social rights. As a consequence, both are conceived as integral to citizenship in democratic South Africa. The constitution imposes particular responsibilities on government to address socioeconomic inequalities as part of a progressive realization of human rights and in ways that erode gender inequalities in addi­ tion to race inequalities (Liebenberg, 1998). The constitutional obliga­ tions are enacted by the creation of an institutional framework (called the national machinery for women) to ensure the inclusion of gender equality concerns in policy formulation. In the early 1990s, women’s organizations, led by the Women’s National Coalition, argued for the greater representation ofwomen in elected political bodies.1As a result of the successes of these strategies, the country has consistently been among the highest performers in the world in terms of the numbers of women elected to political office. social research Vol 72 : No 3 : Fall 2005 621 These developments created the expectation that social and economic policies would follow suit in placing the expansion of women’s social rights at the core of government priorities. However, South Africa’s political representation performance in the 10 years since the inception of democracy significantly outstrips its perfor­ mance in improving women’s economic position. On the Gender and Development Index of the United Nations, South Africa ranks nineti­ eth out of 144 countries. Clearly, political presence does not necessar­ ily mean that poor women’s interests will be adequately addressed in economic and social policy. Poor women are in many respects South Africa’s most vulnerable citizens. Statistics for a 2003 South African labor force study showed that women on the whole had lower incomes, higher unemployment rates, and less access to assets than men (Seidman-Makgetla, 2004:2). African women make up 42 percent of the workforce but only 30 percent of the employed population. Young African women are even worse off, with African women under the age of 30 facing an unemployment rate of 75 percent. Those women who are employed find themselves in the poorest-paying sectors of the labor market, notably in domestic and retail work. In 2003, 96 percent of domestic workers were black (that is, African, Indian, and Colored) women. In South Africa “Colored” refers to people who were designated “mixed race” under apartheid. It remains a demographic categoiy and to some extent a political identity in postapartheid South Africa.) Ninety-three percent of these workers earned under 1,000 rand (R) (approximately $180) per month (SeidmanMakgetla , 2004: 7). African rural women are the poorest category of citizens: in 1997, 65 percent of African female-headed households in rural areas were poor compared to 54 percent of male-headed house­ holds (Seidman-Makgetla, 2004: 40). At 29.4 percent, the mortality rate among African women was more than twice that of white women in 1994 (11.5 percent) (Seidman-Makgetla, 2004:41). It has been estimated that 53 percent of South Africans, including 60 percent of the coun­ try’s children, live in households with the lowest per capita consump­ tion (Samson, 2002: 71). On the UN Gender and Development Index, 622 social research even though women and men had comparable school enrollment and adult literacy ratios, men earned more than twice women’s earnings (Budlender, 2003:10). These gender vulnerabilities are compounded by the HIV/AIDs pandemic. African women are most vulnerable to HIV infection, more women than men are HIV positive, and women are more likely to become infected at a younger age than men. The pandemic imposes additional burdens on women in their roles as primary carers of family members who are HIV positive. These caring tasks, moreover, have to be performed in the context of poor basic services such as the availabil­ ity of electricity, clean water, and modern sanitation. Given these gendered social and economic patterns, this arti...