Empowerment has been a key term in South African business over the past decade. While the focus has been on black economic empowerment, women disadvantaged by socio-cultural discrimination are demanding recognition of the inequity that long denied them various opportunities in business life.

"While there are individual examples of women who have achieved top positions in IT, this is still an exception to the rule," says Ranka Jovanovic, the editorial director at technology news site ITWeb. "The industry is still heavily male dominated."

The University of Cape Town's Department of Information Systems last year published the results of a study entitled Women in IT: A South African Perspective. The survey pegged the number of women working in IT at 20%, a figure similar to that produced in the comprehensive ITWeb IT Salary Survey 2020. Women make up an even smaller percentage of management.

Gender, race and ICT

Jovanovic explains that ITWeb's IT Salary Survey 2020 captured data from nearly 3 000 respondents in February/ March this year, and that only 632 of the IT professionals who responded to the survey questionnaire were women. "Most of these women (75.79%) were white, with only 7.75% Indian, 7.59% black and 5.38% coloured."

While there is an inequality in numbers of women of all races within the ICT sector, racial inequality further complicates the picture. Even so, none of the women interviewed for this feature believed empowerment of women should be racially exclusive.

"For certain positions, there is an employment equity drive, because the necessary opportunities did not exist before, but at Telkom, we in general have an equal spread of women of all races," says Firdous Jacobs, Telkom Executive of Strategy and Business Solutions, in its service organisation, Operations Support Systems. "I would like to add that I don't see myself as a black woman, but as a woman."

UCT's report points to the major role of support organisations, with 77% of the studies participants indicating that they are "important to very important", and 86% indicating that they would support female network organisations. The study also found that more than half of women in ICT act as a mentor to a female colleague. "The majority is motivated by women in IT success stories and they strongly agree that women role models are important," the report notes.

"I think programmes to create opportunities to talk to women while they are still at high school can have a big impact," says Jacobs. "We must help them understand the ICT industry and help them realise that it is a very exciting sector. We must expose them to kind of careers that are available and encourage them to take maths and science as subjects. I

believe the recent Take a Girl Child to Work Project, in which Telkom also participated, was a wonderful opportunity to expose females to what is available in the ICT world."

Fathima Haniff, Market Development Manager at Intel South Africa, also picks up on this point, noting that while more women than ever before are pursuing careers in engineering, mathematics, and science they are still sorely underrepresented in each field. This situation can be reversed if women in the industry become mentors for students and interns with whom they can share their knowledge, skills and experience, says Haniff.

"South African businesses must make budget provision, wherever possible, to take in learners and contribute to creating future wealth" for those groups disadvantaged by to the apartheid regime, adds Jo Melville, managing director, Exhibitions for Africa, which organises IT faires.

Breaking glass ceilings

While past gender-based discrimination in the ICT industry is undeniable, some of the respondents interviewed for this feature felt that the proverbial glass ceiling is fast disappearing, while others were less convinced.

"I believe that the 'glass ceiling' for women in the ICT and in business in general certainly used to be of the laminated type (i.e. loads of resistance, extremely difficult to punch through and even when broken it still holds strongly together)," says Jill Hamlyn, MD of The People

Business Group of Companies. "The current [glass] ceiling is ordinary everyday clear glass where there is little resistance and is very easily breakable. The important element is not purely the resistance of the structure, but the force and energy necessary in getting through. The going has certainly got a lot easier and we can now far more clearly see who and what is on the other side as management in general has been forced to become more transparent."

Jovanovic argues that there still seems to exist a glass ceiling for women in ICT as the ITWeb survey indicates that women are often paid less than men. Reasons, according to Jovanovic, range from lack of corporate transparency to lack of assertiveness on the part of women, and a perception of employers that women are not able to commit as much as men due to family and child care responsibilities. The average income of female respondents was about R20200 per month, while those of their male counterparts averaged R22 000 per month.

"However, this should be qualified by noting that few women were in top management positions, so the average salary reported is obviously skewed by this fact," Jovanovic notes.

Education can bridge the gap

It seems obvious that women are under-represented in the industry, a situation which will need to be resolved through better educational opportunities and easier and more affordable access to ICT infrastructure.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2020 released a policy document highlighting the following areas as requiring action to address gender disparities in the ICT industry:

* Policy, legal and regulatory areas, highlighting a lack of government policies and few women in positions of decision making in the ICT sectors. The paper highlighted the lack of policy and regulations to ensure universal and affordable access to ICT, particularly by rural women and the disabled.

* Technologies and applications; including the low rate of computer literacy and pre-requisite skills for ICT use and lack of basic infrastructure.

* Socio-economic & cultural factors, especially low literacy rates, low awareness of ICT and a low rate of access to ICT infrastructure and applications. The absence of media support for gender issues in ICT was also highlighted.

"To be equally treated and have equal chances women need to have equal access to and be encouraged to study maths, science, computer science, technology subject from an early level - ideally primary school," agrees Jovanovic. "The strategies need to be driven from the highest level – the government and the education department. But the private sector, the IT industry itself, could do a lot by offering learnership programmes, promoting IT at school level, initiating awareness and donation programmes, competitions, etc."

Business and government will once again need to work together to fulfil their obligation to an equal opportunity environment where none of the sections of South Africa's diverse population is under-represented in a key engine for economic and social change.

-- Herman Manson is the editor of media.toolbox and telecom.works. He sits on the editorial advisory boards of The Journal for Convergence and The Big Change. Contact him at [email protected]

Source: Africapulse.net