This Women’s Month marks 70 years since the 1956 march on the Union Buildings. But looking beyond the headline unemployment rate, the numbers tell a more nuanced story about what South African women contribute to the economy, both paid and unpaid.
The Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) for the second quarter of 2026 put the official unemployment rate at 33.6%, up from 32.7% in the previous quarter, with women’s unemployment at 37.5% against 30.3% for men, a gap that has remained stable for most of the past decade.
Since Women’s Day was first observed in 1995, that gap has closed considerably. Back then, unemployment stood at 12.3% for men and 20.5% for women, according to the October 1995 Household Survey, even as overall unemployment climbed sharply in the years since. Covid interrupted that progress and widened the gap again, but the longer trend has been towards convergence.
“The headline unemployment rate only tells part of the story,” says Eighty20, South Africa’s leading consumer analytics and research business. “It doesn’t count the millions of women doing unpaid care work at home. It very likely undercounts the side-hustles and small enterprises many women run alongside that work. Add those in, and women are carrying a far bigger share of this economy than the official numbers recognise.”
Education tells a different story than the labour market does. Between 2008 and 2023, female graduate numbers grew 4.3% a year against 2.5% for men, so that by 2023 women made up two in three graduates, outnumbering men in almost every qualification except doctorates. Yet that shift has not carried through to the workplace: Stats SA’s Q2 2025 QLFS shows 21.5% of employed women are in elementary occupations, against 10.8% of men, and only 7.1% of employed women hold managerial positions, against 10% of men. Women now lead comfortably at the top of the education pipeline and are still overrepresented at the bottom of the occupational ladder, with the better-paid middle, management, still tilted towards men.
Women’s role in government has also grown, with representation in the public service’s Senior Management Service rising from 42.4% in 2019 to 45.2% in 2023, and by April 2026 the Minister of Public Service and Administration confirmed it had passed government’s own 50% employment equity target, including at senior management level. Overall, women hold 779,481 of the public service’s 1.2 million posts.
Eighty20’s Mothers of the Nation segment illustrates another interesting perspective. The Eighty20 National Segmentation divides all adult South Africans, representing over R4 trillion in earnings a year, into eight broadly homogenous groups. The 7 million-strong Mothers of the Nation segment are low-income women, 40% of them grant recipients, mostly unemployed or underemployed. Their average personal income is around R1,000 a month, though average household income is eight times that. When they are employed, it’s typically an elementary occupation, with most Domestic Workers falling into this segment. It is a precarious position: 67% of women with children under two are single or have never been married.
That paid work is at least counted in the statistics. A larger share of women’s economic contribution is not counted at all. To be classified as unemployed, you need to be actively looking for work. Of the 2.4 million adults who sit outside the labour force because of homemaking responsibilities, 2.1 million (or 88%) are women.
None of that unpaid care work shows up in a GDP figure or an employment statistic, although it frees up other household members to earn an income. Reclassify those 2.1 million homemakers as economically active and the arithmetic shifts sharply: women’s labour force participation rate rises from 54.9% to roughly 64.8%, nearly matching men’s 64.4%, while the unemployment rate falls from 37.5% to about 31.9%, close to men’s 30.3%.
“Seventy years from the march to the Union Buildings, the numbers we can measure are only part of the story,” concludes Eighty20. “From the Mothers of the Nation holding households together on elementary wages, to the millions doing care work no employment survey counts, to the women now leading in lecture halls and, increasingly, in government, South African women carry an enormous share of this country’s economy. Women stood up seventy years ago against what they believed was wrong; today they continue to stand up for what they believe is important.”