Women’s empowerment must move from visibility to power, says Deputy Minister Letsike

bongiwe53
2 hours ago
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Women cannot be considered empowered merely because they are visible in public life; they must also have control over budgets, institutions, income, safety and their own time, Deputy Minister Mmapaseka Steve Letsike told the fraymedia Foundation’s Rise & Shine Breakfast in Sandton.

Deputy Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities Mmapaseka Steve Letsike has called for South Africa to move beyond celebrating women’s representation and confront the structures that continue to limit their power.

Delivering the keynote address at the fraymedia Foundation and Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) Rise & Shine Breakfast on 29 July, Letsike challenged guests to consider what meaningful empowerment should look like in women’s everyday lives.

“Is an empowered woman simply visible, or does she possess power?” she asked. “Does she have a title but no budget, a platform but no protection, or a business without access to capital and procurement? Is she praised as resilient because the country has normalised her exhaustion?”

The breakfast brought together women founders and entrepreneurs, media professionals, content creators, and leaders from government, technology and civil society to explore women’s roles in governance and media innovation.

The Rise & Shine Breakfast Series creates a space for women leaders and entrepreneurs to connect, learn from one another and gain practical insights from people who have built and sustained organisations through challenging circumstances. It aims to strengthen women’s leadership, encourage collaboration and help participants develop the networks and knowledge needed to grow their businesses and organisations.

Fraymedia Foundation board member and breakfast host Charmeela Bhagowat said Letsike was “clear-eyed about the challenges facing budding women entrepreneurs and non-governmental public-benefit organisations in the changing global environment”.

Letsike said empowerment must give women genuine control over their “time, body, labour, income, safety and voice”.

“Anything less risks turning a revolutionary demand into a motivational slogan,” she said.

Three clocks of freedom

Letsike situated her address within three significant South African anniversaries: 70 years since the Women’s March of 1956, 50 years since the Soweto uprising of 1976 and 30 years since the adoption of the Constitution in 1996.

She described them as “three clocks of freedom ticking inside the same unfinished democratic project”.

These anniversaries, she said, require South Africans to assess whether political and constitutional progress has translated into economic freedom, education, employment and meaningful participation for women.

Letsike acknowledged the substantial gains made since 1994, including stronger legal protections, expanded reproductive freedom and increased representation of women in Parliament, public institutions and traditionally male-dominated fields.

“We must resist two dishonest temptations,” she said. “The first is to pretend that democracy has delivered nothing. The second is to pretend that what it has delivered is enough.”

Women remain less likely than men to participate in the labour force, are more likely to be unemployed and continue to be concentrated in informal work and smaller enterprises. They are also underrepresented in municipal leadership, private-sector decision-making and the most senior levels of the media.

“The media sector must move beyond counting women to sharing power,” Letsike said. “Who owns the platform? Who controls the budget? Who commissions the investigation? Who benefits from the intellectual property?”

“Representation without ownership can become inequality in a more diverse photograph.”

Care is economic infrastructure

A central theme of the address was the unpaid and underpaid care work overwhelmingly performed by women.

Before the formal economy begins its working day, Letsike said, women are already feeding children, assisting older people, administering medication, fetching water and organising households.

“This labour holds society together, yet much of it is unpaid, underpaid or invisible,” she said. “We call women ‘providers’ and ‘the backbone of the family’, but romantic language can conceal an economic injustice. The nation is subsidised by women’s time.”

She argued that care should not be treated as a private problem for individual women to solve, but as essential economic infrastructure.

When care systems fail, women are more likely to leave employment, decline assignments, postpone education or lose income. Media organisations and other employers therefore need to examine whether their working practices reinforce this inequality.

“A late editorial meeting assumes that someone else is collecting the child,” Letsike said.

“A newsroom that celebrates a woman’s leadership while ignoring her care burden has recognised talent but not reorganised power.”

She called for a South African care compact that recognises, reduces and redistributes care work; properly rewards paid care workers; and ensures that they are represented in the decisions affecting them.

Building sustainable organisations

Letsike also drew on her own experience to discuss the practical challenges of establishing an organisation, raising funds and building sustainable institutions.

Bhagowat said Letsike had “generously shared her experiences and lessons on starting up an organisation, fundraising and sustainability” at a time when women entrepreneurs and public-benefit organisations were navigating a rapidly changing global environment.

“Her candid conversation with the women leaders in the room was appreciated as she outlined the challenges, but also the opportunities that exist for women across the South African landscape as they try to build their businesses and organisations,” Bhagowat said.

The conversation reflected the broader purpose of Rise & Shine: to move beyond inspirational accounts of women’s leadership and examine the practical conditions that allow women-led businesses and organisations to survive, grow and create opportunities for others.

Defending women in media

Letsike warned that gains in gender equality are being challenged by an organised, transnational anti-gender movement using funding, lobbying, legal action, algorithms and disinformation to influence public policy and undermine rights.

This backlash, she said, has a deliberate media strategy that targets women journalists and public figures not only for what they say, but also for being women in public life.

Online violence, artificial intelligence-generated sexualised images, impersonation and coordinated harassment are intensifying the risks women face. Black, queer, disabled and migrant women often experience several forms of attack simultaneously.

Workplace harassment can also be disguised as humour, familiarity or supposedly harmless observations about women’s bodies, clothing, health, sexuality, marital status, motherhood or ambition.

“There is no derogatory joke that is harmless,” Letsike said. “Humour does not neutralise humiliation. It teaches the room that a woman’s dignity is negotiable.”

She called on newsrooms to provide digital-security, psychosocial and legal support, while ensuring that safety policies cover both fieldwork and online abuse.

“Telling a woman to grow a thicker skin is not a policy,” she said.

An information-justice compact

Letsike called for an information-justice compact that recognises journalism as a public good while protecting its independence.

She said public communication procurement should be transparent, fairly distributed and accessible to community, independent and women-owned media organisations. Government payments should be prompt, public data should be accessible and support for digital transformation should be governed by clear criteria and strong editorial safeguards.

“Government must support media without scripting media,” she said. “No journalist should have to exchange independence for survival.”

She pointed to India’s rural women-led Khabar Lahariya news organisation and South Africa’s Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism as examples of media models built around specialist knowledge, community trust, public value and multiple forms of engagement.

Sustainable journalism, she argued, would not be built by pursuing virality alone, but through “trust, utility, community, multiple revenue streams and the courage to know one’s public”.

Bhagowat thanked Letsike for generously sharing her time and knowledge and acknowledged GCIS for making the conversation possible.

Noting the remarks of the Director of Media Engagement, Tshegofatso Modubu, who highlighted how GCIS's alignment to these kinds of engagements was initiated from conversations held in 2019, with the Women in Media Panel Discussion, under the auspices of Step It Up: Gender Based Violence in the SA Media, where a statement of commitment was signed. Seven years later, the GCIS has stayed true to that commitment. Modubu also reiterated that "we need to think of us moving beyond events, and really coming together as a collective," adding that the next conversation GCIS is committing to will be engaging with the platforms around issues of regulation and technology.

Bhagowat also thanked fraymedia Foundation COO, Bongiwe Tutu, whose refrain that “collaboration is the new competition”, Bhagowat said, “rings so true at this time”.

Closing with the words of struggle icon Charlotte Maxeke:

“If you can rise, bring someone with you”

Letsike urged women succeeding in media and public life to open opportunities for others.

“Let it be said that we moved from visibility to ownership, from representation to redistribution, and from policy promise to lived freedom,” she said.