The one thing you learn in the steam room, without the help of a teacher (an outdated word I know, but one which to my mind carries some sense of warmth and responsibility, unlike educator which in South Africa, offers a cold and fictional professionalism- but that’s a whole other story), is that hot air rises. So if you are sitting on the top level, things can get awfully hot up there, an experience which can evoke untold overused metaphors of how hot it gets at the top. In linguistic kindness, I shall refrain. Few of us venture up there and when we do we tend to descend rapidly. So some weeks ago I was listening to a lecture (no not in the steam room, in the Senate Hall, a very prestigious place where everyone is dressed to the hilt so unlike the steam room) about African women and leadership. It was a brilliant piece of research, exceptionally researched and creatively presented. There were few surprises: there is very limited research in this area and that a minimal number of African women occupy positions of leadership and that these are primarily in the service sector. And then the presenter threw in a seemingly small tidbit that perhaps I have intuitively known for some time: the majority of those women who do make it to leadership positions are either single or divorced. But having it said out loud to a huge hall full of people seemed to accord to it a sense of reality that I have hitherto avoided. Simply it meant that women who wanted to be executives had to make a choice: family or CEO? I have yet to read a story fictional or otherwise of a CEO breast feeding, taking kids to school, or even having husband and kids in the family portrait on the desk. Nope, seems like this is not a possibility. Nor does it exist even in the realms of fiction or fairytale. Which means it is not even something we can create in our imagination. Nope, have not even dreamt this. So should we be bodacious and write our own “I have a dream…” story? Yep, I think so.
But then a few days later I was assaulted by another presentation which told me that 56% of South African households are single parent families, of course the majority of these are women headed households and that 79% of single parent homes are among African people and that more than half these families live in poverty. Ok so we have a huge number of single women, but they are going nowhere near the top. They would be lucky if they could simply keep their heads above the quagmire of unemployment, abuse and poverty. In the midst of all this bleakness I heard we are devising a Gender Equality Bill that may seek to enforce gender quotas with respect to positions of power in government and private companies. So how does this Bill live alongside the cultural anachronism of polygamy, the apparent reality that single women have a better chance of a successful career, that even if she is single and competent, the chance of being in leadership is small, that if she is married and has children, she can forget it, and the figures that show a huge number of South African women are bringing up their children without fathers. The mind boggles and the heart sinks!
In the hazy steam room I feel the heat but am bogged down by so many clammy forces that keep me from rising. There are many dreams we have yet to dream.
(Image Credit: David Guglielmo / Moneyweb)