Access for women does not always lead to opportunity

South Africa celebrates Women’s Day annually to honour the approximately 20 000 women who marched to the Union Buildings on August 9 1956 to protest against the extension of pass laws.

Seventy years after their bold stand, an important question remains: if the rights they fought for do not translate into economic opportunity, agency and the power to innovate, have we truly achieved equality?

More than three decades after our first official Women’s Day, we need to ask what we may have misunderstood about women’s empowerment. Too often, we have confused access with opportunity and representation, with power. We have counted the number of women entering institutions without asking what happens to them once they are there.

Last year’s Women’s Month theme, “Building Resilient Economies for All”, remains instructive. This year’s theme, “Empowered Women Empower Nations”, reminds us that women’s economic participation is not only a matter of rights and social justice, it is an economic imperative.

From my perspective as a research and innovation leader, a resilient economy draws on the full range of its people’s intelligence, creativity and experience. Women must therefore be more than beneficiaries, employees or consumers. They must also be researchers, inventors, founders, investors, employers and decision-makers.

Progress, but not parity

South Africa has made measurable progress. Female labour-force participation increased from 50.9% in the second quarter of 2014 to 55.8% a decade later, according to Statistics South Africa. Yet by the second quarter of 2025, women’s participation stood at 54.9%, compared with 65.6% for men. Among graduates, unemployment was 15% for women and 8.9% for men, while only 6.8% of employed women occupied managerial positions, compared with 10.7% of men.

Therefore, South Africa has expanded women’s participation, but participation has not consistently translated into equal opportunity or economic power.

The higher-education paradox

South Africa has made significant progress in women’s access to post-school education, with a tertiary-enrolment Gender Parity Index of 1.39 in 2021, indicating considerably higher enrolment than men. For example, at Stellenbosch University, female doctoral graduates exceeded their male counterparts for the first time last year, while women now constitute more than 60% of first-year science students.

These milestones matter but aggregate figures can conceal persistent inequalities. The pipeline narrows as researchers progress towards senior academic and research leadership, particularly in fields such as mathematics, physics and engineering.

We must ask why women who enter higher education in large numbers do not consistently become professors, senior researchers, executive leaders or owners of intellectual property and research-based companies.

There are a few explanations: too few role models, unequal access to funding and professional networks, disproportionate care responsibilities, institutional cultures that reward uninterrupted career trajectories, and societal expectations that women will be the primary care givers.

Furthermore, early and forced marriages can remove girls from education before they have an opportunity to enter higher education at all. Understadably, universities cannot address every social challenge, but they have a responsibility to support research, dialogue and community engagement that challenges practices and belief systems restricting the development of girls and women.

Building the pipeline

We know that appropriately-designed interventions can work. The Department of Higher Education and Training’s New Generation of Academics Programme and Future Professors Programme provides structured pathways, mentorship and networks for emerging academics.

Stellenbosch University (SU) has also launched SUNRISE, our Research and Innovation Strategic Excellence Programme, and SUNFutuRe, the Future Research Chairs Programme, which supports talented postdoctoral researchers through the difficult transition towards long-term academic and research leadership.

Additional investment would enable us to expand these programmes and increase their regional, national and regional impact.

More than numbers

Counting women in leadership remains important, but numbers alone cannot tell us whether women have the authority and resources to carry out their mandates, or whether their contributions are valued equally. Numbers cannot reveal whether women have access to the informal networks through which influence and opportunity circulate.

At SU, our SUNRISE leadership team has begun conducting “stay interviews” with talented scholars. Rather than waiting for someone to resign, these conversations ask what enables people to succeed, what might cause them to leave and what the institution could change while there is still time to act.

This is how institutions can move beyond recruitment towards retention, progression and sustainable careers.

Innovation must be the next frontier

Employment cannot be the final frontier of women’s empowerment. Innovation must be central to it. With our foci on entrepreneurship, commercialisation and supporting startups and spinout companies, we must ensure we gender mainstream our data and encourage broader participation.

Universities produce knowledge, graduates and intellectual property. They help form companies, license technologies, influence public policy and connect researchers to investment. We therefore have a responsibility to ensure that women have equitable access to research funding, laboratories, mentorship, international mobility, postgraduate supervision and opportunities to commercialise their work.

Women-led research and innovation also needs targeted support, including seed capital, patent and commercialisation expertise, stronger support for spinouts and access to procurement opportunities.

Designing the future

By the 75th anniversary of the Women’s March in 2031, women should not merely be participating in South Africa’s economy. They should be helping to design its future as founders, innovators, research leaders, investors and employers.

This requires deliberate action. Universities and funding agencies should track women’s progression from undergraduate study through doctoral education, postdoctoral training, academic appointment, promotion, research leadership and commercialisation, identifying where women leave the pipeline and intervening at those points.

We must expand successful programmes while investing in complementary institutional initiatives, provide flexible support at critical life and career stages, and strengthen connections between universities, government, industry and investors so that women’s research can become products, services, policies and enterprises that benefit society.

To honour the legacy of 1956, we must look beyond the numbers. Real equality will be achieved when access leads naturally to opportunity, leadership, agency and economic power.

Women’s Month should therefore not only celebrate the rights won by previous generations. It should challenge today’s leaders to remove the barriers that prevent women from exercising those rights fully.

*Professor Moyo is Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation and Internationalisation at Stellenbosch University

Sibusiso Moyo