Gender inequality and discrimination in South African football: Black women demand a bigger share of the pie and the limelight

abstract

Feminist explorations of women’s football have highlighted the gender inequalities and the role of hegemonic masculinity in maintaining discrimination and stereotypes around the women’s game. In this article, I focus on the case of the South African Women’s Football Association (SAWFA) that was submitted to the Commission on Gender Equality for hearing. The South African Constitution Act 108 of 1996 and the Commission on Gender Equality Act 39 of 1996 call for the entrenchment and protection of gender equality as a core democratic right. As much as political parity witnessed between men and women in positions of national, provincial and local level politics are still work in progress, it has failed to trickle down and translate to any discernible reality in other sectors such as sports, and in particular, the football fraternity. Leadership positions in the South African Football Association, as a stark example, are male dominated. The main reason is that football has from time immemorial been regarded as male preserve and widely seen as being not much more than an intramural recreational pastime for women. Female representation in football is hard to find at all ranks in the sport's organisational structures and women’s football is poorly resourced and generally given scant recognition. This article examines the gender dynamics embedded in South African football. It discusses the main instances of gender inequality in football that were surfaced in the SAWFA case against the South African Football Association (SAFA) and the prospects for women’s football to emerge out of the shadows and come into its own as a popular women’s sport.

keywords:

• South Africa
• gender inequality
• women’s football
• discrimination

Notes

1. The CGE made this recommendation, but the Bill has not been passed.

2. See: http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2012/07/09/the-big-read-let-s-hear-it-for-girls, site accessed on 19 April 2016.

3. See: http://www.psl.co.za/article.asp, site accessed on 20 April 2016.

4. See http://www.soccerladuma.co.za/news/articles/categories/south-africa/safa-appoint-vera-pauw-as-banyana-coach/156088 site accessed December 28, 2015.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nobuhle Ndimande-Hlongwa

NOBUHLE NDIMANDE-HLONGWA is an Associate Professor and Dean of Teaching and Learning in the College of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She is the author of an academic text Ukuhlelwa Kolimi’ which translates as ‘Language Planning’. She is one of the guest editors of two special issues of Alternation with the themes ‘African Languages in Africa’s Dispensation of Freedom and Democracy’ and ‘Multilingualism for access, language development and language intellectualisation’. Her passion for football led her to write an article in 2010 on nicknames of soccer teams in South Africa.