A Stats SA report reveals the stark disparity between employment opportunities for men and women entering the country, with SA’s female immigrants less than half as likely to be employed than their male counterparts.
Gender disparity is widespread across SA’s labour market, with men consistently more likely to be employed than women, but the gap is much more pronounced among immigrants, with 45.8% of male immigrants and only 18.2% of female immigrants being employed.
The latest Stats SA data paints a picture of a job market in which female immigrants have a much harder time finding work than their male counterparts, with more than three times more female immigrants being economically inactive than male immigrants.
Even among immigrants who desired and were capable of work but had given up on actively seeking employment, the number of discouraged female jobseekers in 2022 was more than double that of men in the immigrant population.
Part of the challenge is that jobs for SA’s female immigrants are concentrated in domestic services, in which labour demand tends to be stagnant, with 9.4% of women working in private households. Immigrant men tend to find work in the wholesale and retail trade and construction sectors, where there is more room for employment to grow.
Even within the country, women migrating between provinces in search of better job prospects and improved living conditions face disproportionately low odds in SA’s job market.
The same trend thus emerges among SA’s internal migrants, with nearly double the number of female discouraged jobseekers than males in 2022.
The gap in employment opportunities is particularly striking given that both men and women cited the search for paid employment as their primary reason for internal migration between 2011 and 2022, with 13.7% of men and 9.4% of women moving primarily for job opportunities.
However, the second most common reason for men was job transfers or accepting new employment, while female migrants cited moving to live with a spouse, family or friends as their main motivation.
“These trends highlight how economic factors drive male migration, while social and family ties play a stronger role for women,” reads the report.
SA’s immigrant population has grown steadily over the past few decades, from 2.1% of the total population in 1996 to 3.9% in 2022, with women making up 1-million of the total 2.4-million immigrants recorded in 2022.
While immigration to SA from the rest of Africa is male dominated, with three men for every one woman, nearly 85% of SA’s immigrants come from the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) region, in which men make up 47% and women 36.5% of immigrants.
The data shows that SA’s top destination for immigration remains Gauteng, home to 28.4% of male and 21.8% of female immigrants, followed by the Western Cape, with 9.1% of male and 6.8% of female immigrants.
As the department of home affairs promises to undergo an ambitious digital transformation this year, the struggle for equitable employment among SA’s immigrants and internal migrants underpins the need for reform.
Business Day has reported that President Cyril Ramaphosa has made it a priority to reform SA’s visa system to make it easier to attract the skills the economy needs to grow tourism.
In his recent state of the nation address, Ramaphosa said the department of home affairs had cleared more than 90% of its backlog of 300,000 visa applications, and would this year launch an electronic travel authorisation (ETA) system to enable a secure, fully digital visa application and adjudication process.
Home affairs minister Leon Schreiber said last week that the trusted employer scheme, which enables the speedy processing of visa applications for skilled staff by approved employers, was working well and would be expanded to include more employers when other essential automation projects had been completed.
Schreiber told Business Day that the department had received feedback from Business Unity SA, indicating that the scheme has made a “massive difference”, adding that “registered corporates are getting access to skills in a much more effective way than before”.
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