How to attract and retain more women in the workforce

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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.

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.

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.PHILLIPA GEARD: So that would be implementation of particularly flexible working.

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.

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