SA women feel like an afterthought in the services meant to serve them

Findings from First for Women’s latest Her and Now report are based on responses from more than 6,000 South African women.

South African women are doing much of the work required to keep their homes, families and finances together. Yet many feel that the services and systems intended to support them do not fully understand their everyday realities.

This is one of the central findings from First for Women’s latest Her and Now report, titled A World Built for Someone Else.

The report is the second instalment in First for Women’s research into the thoughts, feelings and lived experiences of South African women. Its findings draw on responses collected from more than 6,000 women since 2025.

While last year’s report asked women, “How are you feeling?”, this year’s research went a step further. It examined whether the products, services and institutions around women are helping to lighten their load, or simply assuming they will continue to cope.

 

Women feel overlooked by essential services

Government services ranked as the place where respondents were most likely to feel like an afterthought, with 38% of women selecting this option.

Banking and healthcare followed closely, with 35.6% of respondents saying they felt overlooked by each of these sectors.

The findings also suggest that women rarely wait for a system or service to improve when it fails them. Instead, they find their own solutions.

More than half of respondents, at 56.4%, said they would switch providers or look for an alternative. A further 33.1% said they would work around the problem themselves.

However, switching providers requires time, money and flexibility, resources that are not always available. According to the report, this places additional pressure on single parents, who may have fewer alternatives and less time to navigate complicated systems.

 

Where do women feel seen?

Despite feeling overlooked by larger institutions, many respondents said there are places where they feel recognised and understood.

The local hairdresser and neighbourhood spaza shop emerged as spaces where women are most likely to feel completely seen.

“These are the places that remember a name, a circumstance, a school run, without being asked twice,” the report noted.

According to the findings, the difference between this personal experience and an interaction in a bank queue or call centre is not necessarily about resources. It is often the result of how a service has been designed and whether it takes the customer’s circumstances into account.

 

Nine in 10 women rarely feel safe after dark

Safety remains a serious concern for women across South Africa.

A significant 90.1% of respondents said they never or rarely feel safe walking alone after dark. The figure remains largely unchanged across rural and urban communities.

First for Women Senior Manager of Insights and Research Initiatives Reitumetse Mpholle said only 6% of respondents reported feeling safe after dark in the previous year’s research.

“Women in wealthier, better-lit, more heavily patrolled suburbs and cities consistently report feeling the least safe and least considered, while women in rural villages, farms and informal settlements describe a tighter web of people who walk together, watch each other’s children and share a single boom gate,” Mpholle said.

The report also found that safety comes at a financial cost.

Almost eight in 10 respondents, at 79.5%, said safety concerns had cost them money. Higher-income women tend to spend more in real terms, while lower-income women are forced to make safety-related financial trade-offs more frequently.

These costs may add further pressure to household budgets that are already stretched.

 

Financial products do not reflect women’s realities

Money remains the biggest source of stress for South African women.

According to the report, 32.8% of respondents often run out of money before the end of the month. Almost half, at 47.9%, said they had borrowed money from family or friends during the past year to cover their expenses.

Single parents carry a disproportionate share of this financial pressure.

When respondents were asked what type of financial product they wished existed, similar needs emerged repeatedly across hundreds of open-ended responses.

Women said they wanted credit and savings products that assessed affordability according to their actual cash flow rather than relying only on a fixed monthly payslip.

They also wanted repayment dates that aligned with when their income arrived, instead of systems that penalised them when money was received a few days later than expected.

“Credit and savings tools that judge affordability on real cash flow, not a fixed monthly payslip, with repayment dates that move with real paydays instead of penalising a woman for money that arrives three days late,” Mpholle explained.

In the absence of products that meet these needs, women have developed their own financial support systems.

The stokvel, in its many different forms, was the financial solution most frequently mentioned when respondents were asked what helped to keep their households running.

When a formal financial product fails them, half of the women surveyed said they turn to family before approaching a formal lender.

 

Women continue to carry the household load

The presence of a partner does not necessarily mean household responsibilities are shared equally.

The report found that 75.8% of women living with a partner still handle most of the cooking and cleaning on their own. A further 69.2% said they are largely responsible for doing the laundry.

Mpholle said a partner’s income may affect how a household’s financial responsibilities are divided, particularly as 47.6% of respondents are either the primary earner or an equal earner in their household.

However, having a partner appears to make far less difference to the division of everyday domestic work.

For single mothers, the financial and household responsibilities fall largely on one person.

“The report is blunt about what this means for products and policies. Anything built on the assumption of an equally sharing partner is built on an assumption that holds for only a minority of the women it is meant to serve,” Mpholle said.

 

The unpaid work no one accounts for

Many South African women dedicate a substantial portion of their day to unpaid domestic and care work.

More than a third of respondents, at 36%, said they spend at least five hours a day performing unpaid work in the home. Among mothers with children younger than five, this figure rises to 48.4%.

Despite the amount of time involved and the value this work brings to households and the broader economy, respondents said it remains largely unrecognised.

“77.3% of women agree that neither government nor business has any real sense of how much time and money their unpaid work actually saves or costs,” Mpholle said.

When women were asked what would happen if they stopped performing this work for one month, their responses highlighted how much families depend on it.

Consequences ranged from relatives no longer receiving the care they needed to households losing income or becoming unable to function as they normally would.

The findings show that women are not simply asking for recognition. They are calling for products, services and institutions that acknowledge how they earn, work, care for others and move through the world.

For businesses and policymakers, the message is clear: women should not have to keep working around systems that were intended to work for them.