Digital tools can return time and attention to women, but technology must not become a more efficient way of preserving an unequal division of care.
Every Women’s Month, South Africa rightly celebrates the women leading companies, building businesses and shaping public policy.
Yet the closer one looks at the upper levels of corporate and entrepreneurial life, the clearer the contradiction becomes: women’s talent is increasingly visible, but their progression still stalls before the top.
The usual explanations focus on workplace discrimination, unequal access to capital and the concentration of women in lower-growth sectors. All are real. But there is another barrier hiding in plain sight: the unpaid mental, emotional and logistical work many women perform before, during and after the formal working day.
Before she is an executive or founder, a woman is often simultaneously a daughter coordinating a parent’s care, a sibling holding family relationships together, a wife managing the emotional labour of partnership, a mother overseeing a child’s development, and the household’s operations manager, financial manager and health coordinator—tracking appointments, budgets, medication and logistics that rarely stop for a working day.
