More females [than males] suggest they don’t have money for education: Sanisha Packirisamy – Momentum Investments.
SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Sanisha Packirisamy, an economist at Momentum Investments. Sanisha, I appreciate the time today. A slightly different topic from what we usually talk about – female participation in the economy. Research from the IMF [International Monetary Fund] shows a fairly clear link between a country’s productivity growth and efforts to bolster female participation in the labour force.
SANISHA PACKIRISAMY: Some of these measures do in fact look at paid employment and in fact look at your more formalised sectors of the market. What they’ve defined as the labour force is essentially the number of working-age females who are directly in employment or actively seeking employment.
Now, some of that gap has actually narrowed. That 11%-and-a-bit used to be over 15% at the time of the global financial crisis, but unfortunately that gap didn’t narrow because we had more females coming into the labour force. It narrowed because we had fewer males coming into the labour force over that period of time.
A big portion of this transformation came through from a rise in foreign female workers. So that has to do with policy again. But we also saw that they announced things like free childcare, there were huge media campaigns trying to reduce the traditional norms of gender in the labour force market, they also introduced more parental leave, some more flexitime and other empowerment initiatives. Those all allowed women to re-enter the labour force.
But there was quite a big difference in terms of the amount of time that females actually spend per day doing household work and family care than males do. We also saw some information coming through from the World Economic Forum on this, where females on average in South Africa spend nearly three times more hours per day on doing these household chores relative to their male counterparts.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
How to budget for savings and spoils in 4 stepsLearn how to find the savvy balance between boosting your savings while still treating yourself.
Read more »
South Africa business activity grows in Aug for first time in six months -PMISouth African private sector activity grew for the first time in six months in August as improved demand led to firms boosting output, a survey showed on Tuesday.
Read more »
How to budget for savings and spoils in 4 stepsLearn how to find the savvy balance between boosting your savings while still treating yourself.
Read more »
South Africa business activity grows in Aug for first time in six months -PMISouth African private sector activity grew for the first time in six months in August as improved demand led to firms boosting output, a survey showed on Tuesday.
Read more »
Khan Calls For Pirates Star's Bafana InclusionIn an exclusive interview with Soccer Laduma, renowned youth development coach Farouk Khan has called for in-form Orlando Pirates midfielder Patrick Maswanganyi to be included as part of the Bafana Bafana setup.
Read more »
Gender Reveal Party Ends In Flames As Pilot Crashes In Puff Of...A gender reveal party in Sinaloa, Mexico, took a horrific turn this week when a small plane, hired by an expectant couple to fly overhead, nosedived the pilot to an untimely demise.
Read more »