Understanding gender inequality

Percept | May 2023

Gendered and unequal patterns of giving, receiving, and seeking care are significant features of South Africa’s inequality. Caring processes show up the uneven way financial and decision-making powers are spread across families and between men and women and other marginalised groups. 

Our report illuminates the importance of unpaid care work to the wellbeing of families. Because families remain the primary providers of care in society, caring patterns within the home have profound effects on the education, health, and economic participation of their members. At the same time, more just, equitable caring relations are central to redressing inequality and furthering human flourishing. 

Understanding care as a lever that drives and entrenches gender inequality helps illuminate women, girls, and other marginalised identities’ systematic disadvantage. Care ethics helps mobilise action and ignite our moral and political obligation to reduce gender inequality.

Read more about our research and recommendations in the report below:

Click here to read our op-eds on gender inequality, which were published in various national newspapers: