Hassim appointed to top gender posts
- By Kanina Foss
What drives the exploitation of women, and why is it so pervasive – across nations, cultures and histories? These are good questions, and ones which have provided the basis of Professor Shireen Hassim’s intellectual curiosity, driving a rich academic career that has resulted in two recent prestigious appointments.
The first appointment, in January 2013, was to the Expert Advisory Group of the UN Women’s flagship report, Progress of the World’s Women, which aims to frame and explore key gender and women’s rights issues for a broad audience of gender equality advocates, other policy actors, and students and researchers. “It helps people to understand women’s status around the world,” says Hassim.
Each issue takes up a particular theme and the working title for the next edition is Progress is Making the Economy Work for Women: Claiming, Provisioning and Realising Rights. It is due to be published in 2014.
Women have borne the brunt of the economic crisis all over the world. They work in the most vulnerable sectors, with little legal protection, and are often not unionised. “At one level there’s recognition that women’s rights are human rights, but what does that mean in practice if women don’t have equal access to the economy, or if they bear disproportional costs in good and bad times? Those rights become very empty,” says Hassim.
In South Africa, gender equality is entrenched in our constitution, we have institutions dedicated to developing it, and we have good representation of women in parliament. But South African women are still more likely to be poor and to earn less than men.
“South Africa is interesting because, formally, we have so many things in place which other countries would like to have. We do very well in the Gender Empowerment Measure. But it hasn’t translated into many real gains,” says Hassim.
The schism between gender policy and practice in South Africa is particularly relevant to Hassim’s second appointment, in October 2013, to the expert committee of the Commission for Gender Equality (CGE), a constitutional entity which is committed to the transformation of gender relations in the country.
The role of the advisory committee is to make sure the CGE has a credible evidence base to help it pursue its work.
Both appointments are incredibly prestigious, and are exciting to Hassim because they involve finding and promoting the latest statistics, research and analytical thinking on the status of women. She says good research is critical to our ability to “challenge the spin”. “It reveals the contradictions between rhetoric and reality.”
About Professor Shireen Hassim:
Shireen Hassim is a Professor of Politics and her research interests are in the area of feminist theory and politics, social movements and collective action, the politics of representation and affirmative action, and social policy. She is co-editor of No Shortcuts to Power: Women and Policymaking in Africa (2003); Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context (2006) and Go Home or Die Here: Xenophobia, Violence and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa. She is the author of Women’s Organisations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (2006), which won the 2007 American Political Science Association’s Victoria Shuck Award for best book on women and politics. Her new book, The ANC Women’s League: Sex, Gender and Politics will be published by Jacana in early 2014.