Is a woman's place still in the home?: gender-role attitudes and women's position in the South African labour market

Abstract

This chapter investigates South Africans' attitudes towards women's employment, drawing on the SASAS data related to women's economic participation and the gendered division of labour within heterosexual households. In the sections that follow, we give an overview of changes in women's participation in the labour force in South Africa, discuss feminist literature about the gendered division of labour, and review available studies exploring shifts in attitudes towards women's economic and domestic involvement over time and across different country contexts. Against this backdrop, we then present our findings of South African society's attitudes regarding women's economic participation and caregiving roles. The analysis is based on two sets of items; the first captures attitudes towards women's employment in relation to their parenting role, while the second centres on attitudes toward working mothers with young children. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the results and recommendations for family-related policy and interventions.