Programme Director,

Honourable Minister Sindisiwe Chikunga,

Vice Chancellors and Deputy Vice Chancellors present,

Distinguished leaders from business, academia, government, politics and the diplomatic community,

Director General and senior officials of the Department of Employment and Labour and its entities,

Young officials and young leaders joining us today,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Good afternoon,

Thank you for making the time to be in this room today.

Let's begin with what this afternoon is not. It is not a commemoration. We have spent the month of August recognising the contribution of women to this country, and rightly so. But if we close Women's Month the same way we opened it, with tributes, with programmes, with photographs, we will have missed the point of having the Department of Employment and Labour convene this dialogue.

This Department's mandate rests on two central pillars that matter to every woman in this room and every woman who is not: coordinating the doors that open into employment and protecting people once they are inside the workplace. This Department does not create every job on its own, but it sits at the centre of the system that must open access to work, and every programme, every partnership and every intervention it drives sits under one of those two pillars. So today is not a celebration of women. It is a working session about the conditions under which women work.

This room has been arranged around round tables rather than rows, and five conversations will replace what would ordinarily be five speeches. That is deliberate. The goal is not an afternoon of people listening to one person speak. The goal is what happens when a Vice Chancellor, a development economist, a young official from this Department and a woman running her own enterprise are made to sit at the same table and disagree with each other. That is where the honest material is.

Before turning to the specifics of this Department, it is worth placing this afternoon in a wider frame, because the struggle we are discussing did not begin here and does not end here. There is not a single country on earth that has closed the gap between women and men in work, in pay, or in power. Not one. Everywhere in the world, women still carry the greater share of unpaid care work, are still paid less for work of equal value, and are still underrepresented in parliaments, in boardrooms and in the ownership of capital. In too many parts of the world, women are still denied the basic right to own land, to inherit property, to open a bank account without a man's signature, or to leave school when a family decides a daughter's education matters less than a son's. In conflict zones from the Sahel to the Middle East, it is overwhelmingly women and children who absorb the human cost of wars they did not start. This is worth raising, not to draw comfort from other people's suffering, but to show South African women do not struggle in isolation. Ours is one national chapter of a global story that is far from finished.

Now to bring that story home. South Africa has one of the most progressive constitutional and legislative frameworks for gender equality anywhere in the world. Few countries can point to a Bill of Rights, an Employment Equity Act, and a body of labour law as deliberate about substantive equality as ours. And yet the lived experience of women in this country tells a harder story than our statute books do. In the second quarter of this year, the official unemployment rate for women stood at 37,5 per cent, seven percentage points higher than the rate for men, with well over four million women actively looking for work and unable to find it. Among young women the picture is harsher still. So let us be honest with one another: we have built, on paper, one of the fairest labour frameworks in the world, and we still have not built an economy that gives effect to it for the women who live inside it.

It would be dishonest to suggest that nothing has changed since 1994. Real ground has been covered. Women now hold 42,8 per cent of seats in the National Assembly and 44,4 per cent in the National Council of Provinces, among the highest levels of women's political representation anywhere in the world. Since the 1996 Census, the share of women graduating in business, economics and management sciences has risen from 51,8 per cent to 55,3 per cent, and in law from 41,2 per cent to 48,5 per cent. On the JSE Top 40, women held 38 per cent of board seats and 27,4 per cent of executive positions in 2025, up from 35 per cent and 25 per cent only two years before. These gains are the direct result of our Constitution, three decades of deliberate legislation, and the sustained pressure women themselves have kept up on every institution in this country.

August exists on our national calendar because women marched on the Union Buildings in 1956 against a system designed to control where they could live, move and work. That march was not a symbolic gesture. It was a demand for freedom that included economic freedom, the right to sell one's labour, to move in search of work, to build a life without a man's or the state's permission.

We are now more than three decades into our constitutional democracy. A democracy is not judged only by whether its laws are just. It is judged by whether the people those laws were written to protect can feel that justice in their daily lives, in their payslips, in their safety at work, in whether their daughters have a genuine shot at something better. If Women's Month is going to mean anything for our democracy, it cannot remain a month of tribute. It has to be treated as an annual audit: an honest accounting of how far the promise of 1994, and of 1956 before it, has actually travelled into the lives of women. That is the spirit in which this dialogue should be conducted.

We cannot stand in front of this gathering during Women's Month and speak only about jobs, wages and leadership, as though gender-based violence sits in a separate compartment from the world of work. It does not. More than half of South African women report having experienced gender-based violence in their lifetime. Our rate of femicide is several times the global average. The most recent crime statistics released this month show that while a number of serious contact crimes are declining, violence against women and children continues to rise. Those are not statistics from a foreign report. They describe the country, and in many cases the workplaces, that the women in this room go home to and return from every day.

This is a labour matter as much as it is a security and social matter, and the reason is worth being direct about. Gender-based violence follows women into the workplace through absenteeism, through injury, through the fear that makes a woman hesitate to report a harassing colleague or supervisor because she cannot afford to lose the income. And economic dependency works the other way too: a woman without an independent income is a woman with fewer options for leaving an unsafe home. Economic empowerment is not a substitute for the criminal justice response this crisis demands, but it is one of the few durable defences against it that this Department has the power to build, through enforcement of our laws on workplace harassment and occupational health and safety, and through making sure women are not trapped in poverty level, insecure work that removes their ability to walk away from danger. This afternoon's conversation on protection should hold that connection, not treat gender-based violence as somebody else's portfolio.

It is also worth placing squarely on the table the national economic conditions inside which this conversation is happening, because a dialogue about women and work that ignores the state of the economy is not a serious dialogue. Our national unemployment rate stood at 33,6 per cent in the second quarter of this year, the highest in several years, with women and young people carrying the heaviest share of that burden. The cost of living continues to erode the value of every wage packet, and that pressure falls hardest on households headed by women. The National Minimum Wage remains a critical protection for sectors where women are concentrated, domestic work, agriculture, hospitality, retail, and its enforcement, not merely its existence, must remain a departmental priority.

None of this is raised to leave this room feeling helpless, because this Department is not standing still while these numbers move. Through the Presidential Employment Stimulus, support has reached work opportunities and income support for hundreds of thousands of people, a significant share of them women. Employment Services of South Africa continues to register work seekers and match them to opportunities at no cost, and more women in this room, and in your organisations, should be actively using that service and referring young women to it. The UIF's Training Layoff Scheme exists precisely to save jobs when a company is in distress rather than wait for retrenchment. The Compensation Fund's return to work programmes are there to help injured workers back into employment rather than out of it permanently. Productivity SA works with struggling firms on turnaround support that protects jobs. None of these instruments are perfect, and none of them yet reach far enough into the informal economy, but they are the practical, unglamorous machinery of fighting unemployment, and this dialogue should test them honestly rather than assume the fight is only happening in policy documents.

A significant proportion of economically active women in this country work in the informal economy, largely outside the reach of the UIF, the Compensation Fund, and the protections this Department was built to deliver. Bringing that economy into the fold of protection and support, rather than treating it as someone else's problem, has to be part of how we measure progress. This room should also engage seriously with where the new economy is heading. The just energy transition, digitisation and the green economy will create the jobs of the next decade, and government's own procurement targets for women owned enterprises will only mean something if the pipeline of capable, financed women owned businesses exists to fill them. This is not meant to turn today into a briefing on the state of the economy, but rather to ensure today's conversation about women's leadership and mentorship does not float above the hard economic ground that determines whether any of it is achievable.

This is where the 26th Commission for Employment Equity Annual Report is instructive. It confirms that our labour market remains hierarchical along race, gender and disability, hardening precisely at Senior and Top Management, where institutional power sits. Women are also becoming more visible in the pipeline, but that visibility is not yet turning into power. Our own Commission for Employment Equity reports that men still hold 54,3 per cent of Top Management positions, against 45,7 per cent for women. Black women remain concentrated in the lower to middle levels of management. Persons with disabilities make up only 1,3 per cent of the workforce overall. These are not old figures from a different era. They are current findings, from a report this Department itself produces.

South Africa does not have a shortage of talented women; we have a conversion problem, one that plays out in promotion, succession planning, mentorship, remuneration, procurement and, ultimately, ownership.

This is precisely why the Labour Activation Programme is being reimagined: from an instrument that counts how many people are trained to one that counts how many people actually enter and remain in work, built on demand-led skills development, workplace placement that breaks the "no job without experience" cycle, and enterprise-led job creation. For women and young people, this must become a genuine pipeline from skills to experience, to work, to ownership and leadership, and it will only work if employers bring vacancies, training institutions bring relevant skills, finance unlocks capital, and industry opens markets. The measure of success will not be certificates issued, but lives changed and sustainable jobs created.

So let these be the four questions that set the terms of the conversation. They will not be answered here. That is the job of the five panels that follow. The task now is simply to make sure we do not let ourselves off the hook.

First, where, precisely, are the jobs? We say, often and sincerely, that we want to expand employment for women. But when asked which sectors, which occupations, which pipelines from education into work, the answer tends to go vague very quickly. This dialogue should be specific. Not "women must be economically empowered," but which doors, opened by whom, by when.

Second, are women actually safe, equal and protected at work, or are we describing the law rather than the workplace? This Department carries the legislative architecture: employment equity, equal remuneration, protection from harassment and discrimination, occupational health and safety, maternity protection. The architecture is sound. The discomfort lies in the gap between what is written and what is enforced, and between what is enforced in a boardroom in Sandton and what is enforced on a farm, in a factory, or in someone's home where a domestic worker reports to nobody's HR department. This conversation should sit in that gap.

Third, why do we still speak about women overwhelmingly as job seekers, and so rarely as job creators? Every woman who builds an enterprise that employs other people has done more for this country's labour market than a paragraph in a policy document. Yet our support systems, access to finance, access to markets, access to public procurement, were not built with her in mind. What is needed here is plain talk about what stands between a woman with a viable idea and a woman with a functioning business that employs people.

Fourth, and this is the one this room will not be allowed to avoid, what are those who already hold power prepared to do with it? This event alone brings together Vice Chancellors, a Cabinet colleague, senior executives, senior officials of this Department and its entities. Mentorship cannot remain a word used at events like this one and then quietly set aside on Monday morning. Every established leader in this room is asked to leave here having said, out loud, at your table, one concrete thing you will do to open a pathway for a young woman in the next twelve months. Not a sentiment. A commitment your table can hold you to.

Young officials from this Department and its entities were specifically asked to sit at these tables alongside established leaders, and a young voice was included in every panel. This was deliberate: forums where young people are discussed and not consulted have gone on too long. If the future of work, artificial intelligence, digitisation, the green economy, the skills that will matter in ten years, is going to be shaped by anyone in this room, it will be shaped by the youngest people in it. They should not have to wait for permission to say so.

That same urgency will carry through to the Youth Jobs Summit government is preparing to convene before the year is out. This year marks fifty years since the youth of 1976 marched for their right to a future, and it should not become just an anniversary marked only in ceremony, the same discipline being asked of Women's Month.

Employer groups, organised business and organised labour are therefore called on to come to the Youth Summit not as observers, but as partners prepared to act. What is wanted is not another declaration that simply records intentions, but Jobs Pacts with employers and companies, with clear commitments to create and open opportunities for young people. These pacts must translate into actual vacancies, placements, apprenticeships, learnerships, internships and pathways into sustainable employment. Because ultimately, the success of any commitment made will not be measured by the number of signatures on a declaration, but by the number of young people who can say: I got a job because we came together and acted.

This Department's ask of that Summit is specific: no single department can close the gap between training and a payslip alone, and the design of the Summit reflects that. It asks the Presidency, the Departments of Social Development, Higher Education and Training, and Small Business Development, together with Correctional Services, SAPS, Defence and Traffic, and Gauteng as host province, to bring their programmes and their people to one table rather than working in parallel. It asks the same of the private sector, of partners already committed such as Virgin Active, Old Mutual, African Bank, Uber and Huawei, and of academia and civil society, our universities, TVETs and organisations like Harambee, to match government's reach with theirs. Government cannot fund, train or place every young person on its own, and business cannot open markets or create jobs without the skills pipeline and policy support government provides. Those pacts must be backed by a live national dashboard tracking every young person placed, not just every young person trained, and by post-placement support for the first three months in a job, so that no partner's contribution is wasted for lack of another's.

Over the next few hours this room will move through five conversations: the jobs question, the protection question, the enterprise question, the future of work question, and finally the leadership question, what we do with the power we hold. These should be treated not as five separate panels but as one argument building toward a single point: that employment and protection are not two different agendas for women, they are the same agenda, viewed from before you get the job and after you get it.

Our facilitators have been asked to keep this honest and to keep it moving. Three uncomfortable truths would be worth far more than thirty comfortable platitudes.

Programme Director, over to you and to our first conversation:

Thank you.

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