The intersectionality of gender, race and class in the transformation of the workplace in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

South Africa's Constitution (1996) ushered in a new era for all previously disadvantaged groups and particularly women who were oppressed relative to men of their own race under apartheid. The end of apartheid (1994) and the liberal Constitution (1996) resulted in the end of institutionalised racism. While the debates on racism abound, there is limited scholarship on how gender, race, and inequality interlock in the lives of African women. This postulates that racism persists alongside sexism and results in unequal outcomes for women. The chapter argues that differences are key to explicating women's experience of racism, sexism, and inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. This chapter analyses trends in public data by race and gender to unravel the how positionality of women entrenches various forms of inequality. Given the complexity of the South African context, the levels of denialism regarding the significance of race and the deepening silence around the question of women's emancipation in post-apartheid South Africa, this chapter employs feminist politics and theory to explore how gender and race intersect to shape the women's experience of inequality. We argue that, despite the abundance of evidence regarding the entrenchment of institutional cultures and practices that privilege or disadvantage certain groups of women, little has been done to address the anomaly. The lack of political will to deal with structures and cultures of oppression society. The contribution of this chapter lies in re-igniting the debates regarding the place of women in post-apartheid South Africa. Although policies have drawn women into spaces from which they were previously excluded, more is required to tackle structural sexism and racism, if gendered inequalities are to be reduced.