BRYAN TURNER: Another Women’s Month, another year of failing to make a difference

As SA looks back on another Women’s Month it seems there’s little for women to celebrate in 2021. Financially, women bore the brunt of the pandemic. Of the 3-million South Africans who lost their jobs as a result of Covid-19 and lockdown, 2-million were women. According to Stats SA, the rate of unemployment among women was 36.8% in the second quarter of 2021, compared with 32.4% among men, in terms of the official definition of unemployment.

Through the course of August we also learnt that more than 22,000 schoolgirls fell pregnant between April 2020 and March 2021. Some of them were as young as 10. The latest crime stats also revealed that more than 10,000 people were raped between April and June. The vast majority of those would have been girls and women.

We also know there are zero female CEOs among the JSE top 40 companies, and only 3.31% among all listed companies.

All this points to a country that is failing women of all ages, skills and education levels. As the father of two girls I wonder how I can raise them to believe they can be anything they dream of in the face of statistics such as these. If we’re ever to really match the ideals of the women who marched on the Union Buildings in defiance of the apartheid government in 1956, we all have a lot of work to do. 

Investment community 

The investment community is no exception in that regard. According to a 2020 study by Investec, women fill only 9.4% of senior positions in private equity and only about 18% of the industry’s workforce. It’s hardly surprising then that no women surveyed would like to start their own private equity practice if they left their company, down from 2.3% in 2019.  

This is despite overwhelming evidence showing that gender-smart investment strategies can help grow a company’s competitiveness, solidify its supply base, improve its human capital and help build an overall enabling business environment. In fact, research from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) shows that private equity firms where women comprise at least 30% of the investment decision-making team achieved 10%-20% higher rates of return than those in which women were not well represented.

Without women occupying those positions, female-founded businesses end up missing out on investment. According to the IFC, female investment partners invested in almost twice as many female-led businesses than male investment partners.

Given that about 47% of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in SA are led by women, there’s certainly no shortage of entrepreneurs who could use investment. These are the same entrepreneurs, by the way, who are constantly touted as the engines of innovation, job creation and economic growth. According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group, if women participated equally as entrepreneurs, the rise in GDP across the world could be 3%-6%. Imagine what a positive bump that could be for the SA economy. 

Great female leaders 

For anyone willing to look, it is not difficult to find great female entrepreneurial leadership. A good example of this kind of leadership from within our own portfolio is RunwaySale. Led by cofounder and COO Elmien Hammerschmidt, the Cape Town-based e-commerce retailer employs nearly 150 people, 77% of whom are women.

When we decided to invest more than $5m in 2020, Hammerschmidt’s leadership and passion for the business she’d built up were significant factors. That focus on leadership proved to be prudent when Covid-19 struck and e-commerce activities in SA were severely curtailed. Hammerschmidt guided the company through this particularly tricky time, overseeing its expansion beyond fashion and into homeware and other categories.

The results speak for themselves. Whereas previously RunwaySale was competing with a small cohort of other online fashion outlets, it is now competing with traditional brick-and-mortar stores.

A better future 

The more entrepreneurs such as Hammerschmidt we (and other investors) find, the more jobs there will be for all South Africans. That, in turn, means more paths out of poverty. But it also means more taxpayers to fund government education and health-care initiatives that benefit girls and women. 

It would be fatuous for me to say investment can fix everything. It can’t change the attitude some men have towards women or immediately close the salary gap, for example. But it can do a lot of good and it certainly helps more than empty social media posts and token gestures (cupcakes for the female employees, anyone?) that sum up most corporate responses to Women’s Month. 

So for the next 12 months let’s all try to do better and give SA women the investment they deserve. 

• Turner is a partner at Spear Capital.