Superficially, South African women have made remarkable progress since the advent of democracy. But three decades of gains in status, education, and professional qualifications have been undermined by two related trend lines. The first is that they are being abandoned by men to raise children alone. The second is that they’re forced to do so without the jobs to make that less difficult.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is that female-headed households increased from 37.8% of all households in 1996 to 49.5% in 2022. While some analysis may point to that as evidence of women’s agency and independence, the harsher reality is the alternative view is that the data speak to a breakdown of family structures, and that women are being left to carry the consequences of useless men abandoning their families.

The analysis also shows that the proportion of women who have never been married went up from 44.7% in 1996 to 57.1% in 2022; those who were married fell from 38.8% to 26.6% (those cohabiting increased from 4.9% to 8.2%). What this points to is the accelerating breakdown of South Africa’s family structures, which this newspaper has previously covered, and the inability of millions of people to find secure partnerships. This places huge burdens on women to raise and support children in the absence of fathers.

The more routine information from the survey was that while women have made much progress in education over the last three decades, South Africa’s labour market has stunted the extent of their socio-economic advancement.

Women have made significant strides in education over this period. Among women aged 20 and above, the proportion who had completed matric rose from 15.8% in 1996 to 36.9% in 2022. The proportion with a post-matric qualification doubled, from 6.4% to 12.8%, while the share with no formal schooling fell sharply, from 20.9% to 7.6%.

The educational gains are not only a matter of women entering education at a higher rate now than three decades ago. They are going further with their studies, and are increasingly doing so at a rate above that of men. Stats SA reports that women overtook men in the rate of progression from Grade 9 to Grade 12 from around 2010 onwards. Women have also outpaced men in progression from matric to a bachelor's degree.

The fields of study attracting women are changing too. Women continue to dominate areas such as psychology, education, and communication, but they have a growing presence in fields where men have historically been dominant, including business, economics, and management sciences (where women now make up a majority, with 55.3% of enrolled students in 2022 being women) and law.

There has been progress in the workplace as well. The number of employed women increased from 5.5 million in 2001 to 6.8 million in 2022.

But that all runs into the stubborn realities of South Africa’s economic record. While the number of women in employment has risen, this has to be understood alongside the substantial growth of the female working-age population, from 14.8 million in 2001 to 21.3 million in 2022 – in other words, while the number of employed women increased by some 1.3 million, the potential workforce had grown by 7.5 million.

As a consequence, the female unemployment rate rose from 27.9% in 2001 to 35.6% in 2022.

The importance of family structures is often derided in modern Western culture as a conservative throwback, but as the data in this article reveal, the consequences of family breakup fall disproportionately on the shoulders of women, who are left to raise children without the resources to properly do so. Fixing that requires two things: one, of course, lies in the economy and getting it to grow more quickly, but the second is to restore the conservative principle that men have a responsibility to look after and support the families they helped to create, and that simply walking away from that responsibility is not socially acceptable.