NACI Resources Studies, etc Facing the Facts 2009

Gender equality is one of the core ideals preserved in the Bill of Rights of the South African Constitution (1993). The government has, therefore, adopted the approach of ‘mainstreaming gender’ in order to respond to gender inequalities. To do that, the government has established ‘gender desks’ or ‘gender focal points’ within each government department, whose responsibility is to ensure the integration of a gender perspective into all policy and implementation activities. 

The government has also developed policy and legislation that tagged women as a specific group e.g. Employment Equity legislation. A strong feature of the focus on women and gender is the emphasis on the under-representation of women in the science and technology human resource base. For example, one of the key weaknesses in the existing science and technology system identified in the Research & Development (R&D) Strategy (2002) is the “frozen demographics” of the human resource base. The R&D Strategy notes that the scientific workforce in South Africa is shrinking and growing older insofar as “black and women scientists, technologists and engineers are not entering the academic publishing ranks and that the key research infrastructure is composed of people who will soon retire.” Furthermore, women tend to publish considerably less than their male counterparts, with the publication outputs of women in the 1990s comprising about one fifth of the total. 

As part of a number of interventions suggested by the National Plan and R&D Strategy to address gender equity challenges, the establishment of the South African Reference Group [SARG] of Women in Science, Engineering and Technology (currently known as the Science, Engineering and Technology for Women [SET4W]) sub-committee of the National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) was proposed. The aim in establishing the sub-committee was and still is to strengthen women-led initiatives in all phases of participation within the Science,
Engineering and Technology (SET) sector, from school to career achievement.
As a result of the continued significant gender imbalances in the SET sector coupled with little evidence of strategies to address these, in 2008 the SET4W sub-committee commissioned a follow-up study to update the 2004 report entitled Facing the Facts: Women’s Participation in Public Sector Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) in South Africa.