Women's Empowerment In The Workplace

Women’s empowerment is a process where women become more aware of sex‐based inequality in power relationships by which they start to acquire a greater stance where and start to speak out against the inequality they see in their community, home and the workplace. It involves women taking control over their lives: solving problems, building self‐confidence, developing self‐reliance and gaining skills to ensure better work opportunities. (COSATU, 2015) From as early as the 1930’s woman have had to fight for fair labour in their respective working fields (SACTWU, 2015), as they were only seen as a “male appendage” and not an individual in their fight for equality in the 1950’s. (SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY ONLINE, 2015) In our new democratic country

In certain work fields men don’t get any form of paternity leave, leaving them with no other option but to use their family days or sick leave. This is only one of many debates regarding gender equality in the labour market. To have more women in the workplace will contribute to economic performance through multiple processes. Limiting women’s active participation in the workplace has been found to be extremely costly studies in Asia shows, reportedly the Pacific loses US$42 billion - US$47 billion annually as a region with the reason for this being; limited to no access to employment opportunities for them. (SCHWAB, 2014)

With this assignment I aim to shed some light on the current state of gender equality and trade unions by providing some insight into the process unions have used to incorporated gender equality in their structures, and policies. I will also discuss the topic of gender wage gap, what causes it and what can be done to prevent it.

Post-1994: The New

So to make up for that the ANC came in with new legislations and laws to prevent this gender discrimination from happening again. With the new constitution they tried to established equality for women this included clauses like; non-discrimination on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation or marital status (Munakamwe, 2014). National Gender Machinery was established in the form of; the Ministry for Women, Children and People with disabilities and Commission of Gender Equality, to fight for various women’s rights in the workplace. (Munakamwe, 2014) i COSATU

COSATU has showed a keen interest in promoting gender equality to see the effect it has on giving women a bigger role in the work place. This interest was set in to motion by the government giving them a part in the “gender focal persons” movement. This was viewed as a highly mainstream move by the government. In November 2013 a bill called the “Women Empowerment and Gender Equality Bill’ (WEGE) was passed. This Bill gave the ministry power over traditional authorities and community organisations, and all private and public institutions in order to ensure:

• they provide necessary support, ensuring women can participate and