Women’s Month has come and gone – what remains?
A gender pay gap that is largely hidden from view and too few companies with credible strategies to address it. For one month, women become a lucrative consumer demographic, while the inequalities that shape their economic lives remain remarkably ordinary. Every August, there is a holiday-ification of gender equality happening where South African companies celebrate women loudly and in public. Panels, awards, campaigns, promotions, tributes to the women they admire. But come 1 September, the displays end and what continues is the lack of displaying the numbers. Reflected in what women are paid relative to men and obscured by limited disclosure of gender-disaggregated remuneration data.
But it is not just retailers. Banks, insurers, telecommunications companies, mining companies and some of South Africa’s largest listed businesses are all eager to court women as consumers during Women’s Month.
Just Share’s latest analysis of the JSE Top 40 found that only 17 of 40 companies disclose quantitative gender pay-gap data. Of these, only eight disclose data covering their South African workforce.
That lack of publicly disclosed, quantitative gender pay-gap data matters because South Africa’s gender pay gap cannot be separated from the wider inequalities shaping women’s participation in the labour market.
According to Stats SA 2026 Quarter 1 report, 42.6% of South African households were headed by women in 2025. Women’s access to decent and fairly paid employment therefore has consequences for the economic security of entire households.
Against this backdrop, the following Q1 2026 data from the Stats SA QLF survey report further emphasises the negligence of non-disclosure. The data shows that women are less likely than men to participate in the labour market in the first place: only 53.8% of working-age women are in the labour force, compared with 64.2% of working-age men. And among those who do participate, women are less likely to secure employment, with a 36.4% unemployment rate compared with 29.6% for men.
Blatantly, the pay gap isn’t simply women being paid less than men for identical jobs. It is produced by a labour market that determines who gets into which jobs, firms and levels of seniority in the first place.
And yet, despite the complexity of the problem, the majority of the most investable companies are not as invested in disclosure.
A company can tell us that it believes in “closing their gender gap”. But without gender-disaggregated remuneration data, shareholders, employees and the public cannot meaningfully assess whether those commitments translate into equitable outcomes.
And where regulation requires disclosure, companies are capable of doing so.
The European Union’s Pay Transparency Directive provides a useful example. The Directive represents a shift from voluntary commitments towards mandatory transparency and accountability. It requires greater transparency around remuneration, employee access to pay information and gender pay-gap reporting for employers with at least 100 employees. Where a gender pay gap exceeds 5% and cannot be objectively justified, employers must undertake a joint pay assessment with employee representatives and address its underlying causes.
The lesson for South Africa is not that we should simply copy European regulation. It is that voluntary disclosure has limits.
Some South African-listed companies already operate in jurisdictions where gender pay-gap reporting is required. They therefore possess many of the systems and processes needed to produce this information. Yet information disclosed to regulators and stakeholders in Europe or the United Kingdom is not necessarily disclosed to South African stakeholders.
If companies can measure the gender pay gap when another regulator requires them to, why shouldn’t South African employees, shareholders and the public have access to the same information?
And those who operate solely in South Africa aren’t left out of this conversation. They already collect gender-disaggregated remuneration information for Employment Equity reporting.
Perhaps, South Africa’s Companies Amendment Act 16 of 2024 could close the gap.
Importantly, the law tells shareholders more about the distance between executives and average employees. However, the distance between men and women doing work of equal or comparable value is left out of the amendment’s public disclosure.
It is striking that, as the first African country to lead the G20, South Africa endorsed the Brisbane-eThekwini commitments, including a target to reduce the gender wage gap by 15% by 2035, while domestic remuneration practices remain opaque.
Unlimited narratives, goals and architecture to address closing the gender pay gap in South Africa. But the crucial first step is adopted by a slim few. Without spotlighting the numbers there are severe limits to creating meaningful strategies. We cannot address what we cannot see.
Next Women’s Month, the standard should be simple: companies should not only celebrate women’s economic value, but demonstrate it through transparent, gender-disaggregated workforce and remuneration data.
Because women do not become economically empowered by being celebrated alone.
They become economically empowered when they have economic power.
© armmypicca, 123RF Free Images
Ogone Lekalaka is an intern at Just Share.
