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JEREMY MAGGS: Now, a new report is finding underutilised, skilled female talent could address the country’s skill shortage. The findings of South Africa’s largest working women report sheds new light on the challenges and opportunities surrounding female participation in the workforce, and also provides significant recommendations for businesses to address the country’s skill shortage by tapping into underutilised female talent.
More now from Phillipa Geard, who is founder of RecruitMyMom. Phillipa, welcome to you, and firstly, what are the key factors then contributing to this underutilisation?
PHILLIPA GEARD: The underutilisation comes in terms of the context that we find ourselves in South Africa. I’m going to just paint the picture of the context in order to answer the question, is that we have a massive skill shortage in South Africa, as we know, second crisis to our economic growth compared only second to load shedding. What we are seeing is we have more female graduates coming out of tertiary institutions and more females entering the workforce than we’ve ever seen before.
In addition to which we are finding across Africa, more and more Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates of are growing. So 47% of all Stem graduates across Africa are now female as well.
What the study finds is that as women progress in their careers, 49% of them at least are taking a pause somewhere along in their careers and largely due to the fact that they’ve got dependants, and they start to then fall off in their careers.
So they take a break, they come back, but they end up being what we call the missing rung in the ladder. If you look upwards to where seniority is in terms of where people are in executive positions in South Africa, we’ve got a very, very tiny percentage of women sitting in executive positions in South Africa.
What the report is saying is that you’ve got this increased number of educated women entering the market, yet we are losing them along the way and why?
What we are saying is there are barriers to entry. They’re looking for financial reward. We know that there’s pay discrimination, there’s lack of internal opportunities. Also, one of the findings is ways that companies can help women work through those career pauses, by retaining them through flexible practices, which definitely came out of the report as something that businesses can look at as an opportunity to attract and retain talent.
Read: Women workers to be hurt more than men by AI wave, McKinsey says
JEREMY MAGGS: All right, lots to talk about Phillipa, but more broadly, as you paint this picture, it’s a real indictment on the current workplace environment and culture in this country. So what does business need to do to address this?
PHILLIPA GEARD: First of all, we look at the barriers, what are the barriers that women are seeing, and to address it, first of all, what are the internal opportunities for growth? So have a long-term strategic plan as to how you’re going to attract and then retain women all the way through the various stages of their careers so that you can develop them into senior management levels.
JEREMY MAGGS: What does that plan look like?
PHILLIPA GEARD: So that would be implementation of particularly flexible working. So hybrid working came out as number one in terms of what people are looking for. So the assumption often is that women are looking, particularly mothers, are looking for part-time work. Overwhelmingly the report showed actually people want to work full-time, but they are looking for work in a hybrid manner.
That’s because they’re looking for the social interaction. They’re looking to be part of the office situation, but they don’t want to be full-time in office.
So look at flexible work policies, look at opportunities for growth, look at networking and mentoring opportunities that will help women feel included and have this opportunity to be able to go through the full career spectrum all the way up to seniority. That’s another one that came out really as being important. Particularly have a look at how one can even attract people back who’ve had career pauses.
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So they have had the skills, they’ve got the skills, they’ve taken a pause, they may be slightly out of sync with what’s happening in the tech space. But what we’ve seen particularly in the tech world here is if you can attract people who’ve been, for instance, a Sap (System Applications and Products) project manager, they’ve taken a career break and you bring them back into the workplace, all you need to do is update them on the tech, but they’ve got all the other skills and experience. So there are just different strategies that businesses can adopt to do this.
JEREMY MAGGS: Sadly, conventional wisdom would suggest that in attracting women back into the workplace the sense would be that they have not kept up with developments and therefore would be of some risk to an organisation. Obviously not true, but it would be a concern.
PHILLIPA GEARD: Yes, I do believe that it’s partly valid in that they will need some kind of updating on the tech. But in terms of the fundamentals of how do you manage people, how do you manage a project, how do you engage with clients, all of the stuff that comes through experience, that’s all there. But all they need is a couple of months, six months probably to catch up on the tech, and returnships are starting to become very, very popular in a way of attracting these women back.
But this report is… not just about women who have had career pauses, this is also about women who are currently working and 45% saying, we are working, but we are currently looking for another job because we’re not happy.
JEREMY MAGGS: Is there a sense that business is getting to grips with these concerns?
PHILLIPA GEARD: I think we’ve made enormous progress and we really wanted to bring this report out, not as a stick, but as a carrot to business to say we honestly have made enormous progress. I think Covid helped everybody understand that remote and flexible working is possible. However, we’ve seen an interesting debate happening in the last couple of years of businesses starting to consider do we bring everybody back in office.
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What this report shows is that’s not going to help with your diversity. This isn’t going to help with this long-term phenomenon and reality of a larger female workforce entering the market.
If you’re going to recognise that there are more educated women entering the market and you’re going to have a long-term strategy on how do you build diversity in your organisation to retain and attract, you’re going to have to embrace flexibility and not reject it at this point.
JEREMY MAGGS: Phillipa Geard, some very useful insight there and one hopes that business is listening. Thank you very much for joining me on the programme.
