Address by the Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Dr Blade Nzimande on the occasion of the UN Women’s participation in Higher Education in Southern Africa: Understanding the regional scenarion webinar

Your excellences

Distinguished guests

Ladies and gentlemen

The Department of Science and Innovation congratulates the UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa for hosting this important webinar. This webinar is timely as United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW 67th Session) recently concluded last month to evaluate progress and formulate concrete policies to promote gender equality and the advancement of women worldwide.

Racial and gender discrimination during apartheid in South Africa profoundly shaped the South African society and resulted in rampant inequalities. Women faced additional burden of discrimination purely on the basis of gender. Even now as we discuss this important topic, studies still show that gender equity gap in higher education continues to be a global phenomenon. In Africa, the gender gap is particularly more worrying as it continues to lag behind.

In South Africa, women also remain under-represented in the area of permanent academic staff as they comprise approximately 43% in public higher education institutions. This inequality becomes even more pronounced at senior academic positions where women account for approximately 18.5% women professors and 29.8% as associate professors. This is despite the fact that women professors tend to have strong publication records and high qualifications. This gap also manifest itself in the salaries that women receive compared to their male counterparts. There are many barriers that women face which exacerbate this problem. These include amongst others:

Failure to recognize, identify and nature women’s talents.

The gender division of labour in academia where women tend to be relegated to organizational work and men be appointed in leadership positions. There is a need to emulate progressive policies for countries like Sweden where women account as much as 43% as vice-chancellors. This has been achieved through innovative programmes where universities are incentivized financially to appoint women to the professoriate to ensure gender parity.

While funding is an issue, but it is not a silver bullet, as I have indicated earlier, publishing is sometimes used as a gender discriminatory tool. For example, in a study conducted to determine the number of women that had appeared as academic authors on JSTOR journal articles between 1665 and 2010, over the entire 345 years, 22% of all authors were women and only about 19% of first authors in the study were women.

There are also traditional stereotypes that influence women’s progress in higher education that remain in place that require dedicated and strategic attention. These range from women entering academia at lower levels than men, differing leadership approaches between men and women, inherently stubborn cultural beliefs and values, and many other forms of discriminatory practices.

Regrettably, in South Africa, given our history, we are no exception to these systemic barriers. South African women are still hugely under-represented in leadership positions. For example, out of the 26 universities, at some point, only five have been led by women vice chancellors. This can also be attributed to a small pool of women that are “ready and qualified” for promotion due to systemic barriers. This is contrary to the enrollment trends in South Africa where women make the largest proportion of students and yet this does not translate to equitable representation. Under these circumstances, women have no choice but to navigate their way through an environment that does not fully hear or see them.

A concurrent study on Building the Next Cadre of Emerging Researchers in South Africa focused on the many black and female researchers in the emerging researcher cohort or category, was commissioned and sought to answer two key questions, which are-

To establish the proportion of senior lecturers and lecturers who have PhDs, are publishing and active in seeking research funds; and

Understand the environmental context, enablers and impediments to increasing the number of emerging researchers at systemic, and institutional and individual levels, with a focus on black and women researchers.

As part of its findings, the Ministerial Task Team Study observed that institutional cultures and practice impediments such as racism, sexism, competing academic responsibilities, lack of role models and mentors, and the inability to embark on a research career are significant barriers that work against the recruitment, retention and progression of black academics.

In response to its findings, the MTT study, made some of the following recommendations-

universities need to do more to tackle racism and sexism in all forms – including through penalising perpetrators and building anti-racist and anti-sexist cultures;

progress towards the achievement of equity targets should be built into the performance agreements of university senior management;

a collaboration between Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and the Department of Labour (DoL) to review the extent to which universities comply with employment equity legislation;

funding for postgraduate studies and recruitment strategies must take equity issues into account; and

universities should ensure greater participation by African and female South African doctoral students in postgraduate enrolments, and especially in fields where participation patterns remain inequitable.

The Guidelines and its successor, namely the Postgraduate Funding Policy, set an equity target of a minimum of 55% of female postgraduate students receiving support. It also pleases us to note that, our entity, the National Research Council (NRF) reports that, it has consistently achieved the target of funding 55% female students at Honours and Masters levels. However, the target of 55% female students supported at PhD level has been elusive, with its achievement only coming forth only in the two recent outer years of 2020 and 2021. We trust that the performance data for 2022 will not be an aberration to this recent trend.

As part of our interventions to address the pipeline for women in research and leadership positions, the Nurturing Emerging Scholars Programme has 90% Black South African, and 55% Black women recruitment target. So far, universities have been awarded 104 NESP scholarships for enrolment of candidates to 2-year Master’s degrees linked to an academic internship in their third year.

The New Generation of Academics Programme has transformation intake goals of 80% Black and 55% women. The programme comprises a three-year development programme (to acquire a PhD), and a further three years of tenured academic position. Eight phases of the nGAP have been implemented resulting in 760 allocated posts to universities.

The DSI, through the NRF, implements two flagship research grant programmes targeted at young black and women emerging researchers.

These are the Thuthuka Programme and Black Academics Advancement Programme (BAAP), which support emerging researchers holding academic or research positions at South African public universities and public research institutions.

In conclusion, we are mindful of the fact that, in spite of our many interventions and those of other stakeholders, there are still some gaps in the system and there is a need to accelerate the work that seeks to improve the position of women as researchers and decision-makers within our higher education institutions and national system of innovation.

It is therefore our hope that webinars like this will produce well thought out and practical recommendations on how we can enhance government policy and the broader transformation agenda.

Source: Government of South Africa