South Africa’s gender pay gap is shaped by more than the salary women receive at the end of the month. As Prof. Linda Meyer explains, inequality can begin much earlier, in the industries women enter, the opportunities available to them, and the employers they can access. While direct pay discrimination remains a concern, understanding the wider factors that influence where women work and what they earn is essential to addressing the persistent gap.
1. From your perspective, why does the gender pay and opportunity gap persist, even as more women enter and succeed in the workplace?
The gap persists because women’s increased participation has not automatically changed how work, opportunity and responsibility are distributed. The scale of it is still stark. The Commission for Gender Equality estimates that South African women earn around R74 for every R100 earned by their male counterparts.
Women may enter an organisation in significant numbers but remain concentrated in lower-paying functions or at levels with limited decision-making authority. Women still hold less than 30% of top management posts in South Africa, and only 25.3% in the private sector. Career progression is also affected by the unequal distribution of unpaid care work, which carries the strongest causal evidence of any driver.
Research on the “child penalty” shows that becoming a mother, rather than gender itself, accounts for most of the earnings gap that opens up over a career. Added to that are restricted access to influential networks and persistent norms and stereotypes about women’s availability or ambition. Representation is important, but it does not guarantee equal pay, authority, or opportunity. The real test is whether women progress into roles that shape strategy and command higher remuneration.
2. What are some of the biggest barriers women face when trying to access higher-paying roles and career opportunities?
One of the greatest barriers is that access to opportunity is not determined by qualifications alone. Women may have fewer opportunities to lead major projects, manage budgets, gain operational experience, or enter roles that traditionally provide a route to executive leadership.
Recruitment and promotion criteria can also favour conventional career paths, penalising those who have taken time out or require flexibility. South Africa’s high unemployment further weakens employees’ bargaining power. These barriers accumulate, leaving many capable women qualified for advancement but without the experience, sponsorship or visibility organisations demand.
3. How do career choices and gender stereotypes influence women’s earning potential?
Career choices are not made in a social vacuum. From school subject selection onwards, girls and young women receive messages about which fields are considered appropriate, secure or compatible with family responsibilities. This can steer them towards education, care, administration and service occupations, while men remain more strongly represented in technical, operational and other traditionally better-paid fields. The problem is not the value of women’s work, but how differently that work is rewarded. Expanding women’s earning potential therefore requires challenging occupational stereotypes and widening access to high-growth fields from an early age.
4. Do you believe women have equal access to promotions, leadership positions and career-advancing opportunities?
No, not yet. Women’s representation has improved, but the pattern changes considerably at the highest levels of authority. South Africa’s latest Commission for Employment Equity report shows that women held only 27.6% of private-sector top-management positions in 2025, despite forming 45.7% of the economically active population.
Access is also about more than the final promotion decision. It includes who receives strategic assignments, leadership development, exposure to senior decision-makers, and responsibility for revenue-generating work. If women are excluded from these career-building opportunities, inequality is established well before an executive position becomes available. (CEE report)
5. How do caregiving and motherhood affect women’s career progression?
Caregiving can affect women’s careers through interruptions, reduced working hours, and assumptions about their commitment or availability. Women may decline travel, relocation, or demanding assignments because care systems are inadequate, not because they lack ambition. Returning mothers can also find that their responsibilities, visibility or progression prospects have diminished during their absence.
The result can be slower advancement and lower lifetime earnings, including reduced retirement savings. Employers should recognise that caregiving is a social reality rather than an individual weakness and design flexibility, parental leave and return-to-work support so that care does not become a career penalty.
6. What role do workplace cultures, unconscious bias and gender stereotypes play in determining who gets hired, promoted or paid more?
Workplace culture influences whose potential is recognised and whose leadership style is regarded as credible. Entrenched gender perceptions can cause the same behaviour to be interpreted differently: confidence in a man may be seen as leadership, while confidence in a woman may be judged as difficult or abrasive.
Women in traditionally male-dominated roles may also face a double bind, in which displaying authority makes them appear less likeable, while a more collaborative approach causes their competence to be underestimated. Bias can enter supposedly neutral decisions through assumptions about who “fits” a senior role, can handle pressure, or will remain available over the long term.
When hiring, promotion and pay decisions rely heavily on informal judgement; familiar candidates tend to benefit. Clear criteria, diverse decision-making panels and documented decisions make these biases easier to identify and challenge.
7. How does the lack of transparency around salaries and remuneration affect women’s ability to negotiate fair pay?
Pay secrecy creates an information imbalance. Employees may know what they earn but not whether colleagues doing comparable work receive more, making it difficult to identify an unjustified disparity or negotiate from an informed position. This can disadvantage women who have historically had less access to salary information or influential professional networks.
It also allows inconsistencies introduced at recruitment to follow an employee throughout her career because future increases are often based on existing pay. South Africa recognises the principle of equal remuneration for work of equal value, but meaningful implementation requires employers to examine, explain and correct disparities. (Equal-pay code)
8. Are there particular groups of women who face even greater barriers to accessing well-paid work, and why?
Women do not experience the labour market in the same way. In South Africa, race, disability, geography, income and educational access can compound gender disadvantage. A woman in a rural or township community may face poor transport, limited digital access, safety concerns and fewer nearby employers before she can even compete for a position.
Women with disabilities may encounter inaccessible workplaces and assumptions about their capacity, while younger women struggle to gain experience and older women may face both age and gender bias. Effective policy must therefore address the different conditions shaping women’s access to opportunity rather than treating women as a single group.
9. How important are skills, mentorship and professional networks?
Skills are essential, but qualifications alone do not guarantee progression. Women also need opportunities to apply their skills in demanding roles, build a track record and become visible to decision-makers. Mentors can provide advice and help women navigate an organisation, while sponsors go further by advocating for them when projects, promotions or leadership roles are allocated.
Professional networks provide access to information, collaborators and opportunities that may never be formally advertised. These interventions must, however, complement fair institutional systems. Women should not have to overcome structural inequality solely by becoming better networkers or finding individual champions.
10. What can employers do differently to ensure that women have a fair pathway into higher-paying roles and leadership positions?
Employers should examine the entire career pathway rather than concentrating only on the number of women appointed at senior level. They need to track recruitment, starting salaries, training, project allocation, promotion rates, performance ratings and departures by gender and occupational level.
Promotion criteria and salary bands should be clear, with decision-makers required to explain significant differences. Women must also receive access to operational, technical and revenue-generating roles that prepare employees for leadership. Flexible work, meaningful parental support and structured return-to-work programmes can prevent caregiving from derailing progression without lowering expectations of performance or leadership potential.
Employers should also establish formal sponsorship programmes, recognising that mentorship guides while sponsorship involves senior leaders actively advocating for women’s promotion and access to career-building assignments. Managers should be held accountable not only for developing female talent, but also for ensuring that capable women gain the visibility, experience and opportunities required to advance.
11. What role should government and business play in closing the gap?
Government needs to enforce and strengthen South Africa’s framework for equal pay, employment equity and protection against workplace discrimination. It should also use labour-market data to identify growing or better-paid areas of the economy in which women remain under-represented, while investing in affordable childcare and education pathways into fields requiring scarce and emerging skills.
Business must move beyond compliance by auditing pay and progression, increasing remuneration transparency, setting measurable goals and holding leaders accountable for results. Employers should also examine who receives training, sponsorship and career-building assignments, rather than focusing only on senior appointments.
Closing the gap requires coordinated action because legislation will achieve little if workplace practices remain unchanged, while employers cannot correct unequal access to education, care and economic opportunity on their own.
12. If you could change one thing about the world of work to create greater economic opportunity for women, what would it be and why?
I would make pathways to career progression far more transparent and accountable. Employees should be able to understand what roles pay, how promotion decisions are made, which experience is required, and how career-building assignments are allocated. Clear salary bands, promotion criteria and development pathways would expose disparities that can remain hidden behind managerial discretion and give women a stronger basis on which to plan, compete and negotiate.
Greater transparency would also benefit employers by shifting decisions towards demonstrable ability rather than visibility, familiarity or informal influence. When the route to advancement is clear, and decisions can be scrutinised, women have a fairer opportunity not merely to enter the workplace, but to progress and lead within it.
