The rise in female labour force participation in South Africa : an analysis of household survey data , 1995-2001.
Year: 2003
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In the 1990s nationally representative and detailed household survey data became \navailable for the first time in South Africa, opening up opportunities to examine some \nof the key movements in the labour market especially. This thesis investigates one of \nthese: the continued and dramatic rise in female labour force participation that has \noccurred in post-apartheid South Africa over the period 1995 to 2001. The rise in \nwomen's participation, also referred to as the 'feminisation' of the labour market, is a \nphenomenon that has been observed and analysed in many countries around the \nworld, and yet has remained largely undocumented in South Africa. The \n'feminisation' that has been recorded in the international literature generally refers to \nthe rise in women's share of the labour force coupled with a rise in women's share of \nemployment. What is striking in the South African case, however, is that over the \nperiod under review here regular employment opportunities in the formal sector of the \neconomy have been indisputably limited, and yet female labour force participation has \ncontinued to increase. The increase in participation has translated mainly into a rise in \nunemployment and in generally low-paying forms of self-employment in the informal \nsector. This raises the question why so many more women chose to enter the labour \nmarket over this period in spite of their dismal prospects, a question that is explored \nas far as possible in this study given the constraints imposed by the data available. \nThis thesis is presented in three main parts. The first part consists of a review of the \neconomic theory of female labour supply and a review of the international literature \non the trends, causes and consequences associated with the rise in female labour force \nparticipation over time. The second and largest part of the thesis consists of an \nempirical analysis of the factors driving the rise in female labour force participation in \nSouth Africa. The broad trends in the labour force between 1995 and 2001 are \ndocumented, some of the supply-side correlates of labour force participation are \nexplored descriptively, and then the determinants of the rise in female labour force \nparticipation in South Africa over this period are tested more thoroughly in a \nmultivariate regression and decomposition analysis. The final part of the study turns \nto the question of what the rise in female labour force participation has 'bought' \nwomen in terms of access to employment and earnings for those women who did have \nwork in the period under review.
Author: Daniela Casale
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1510860641