The common perception is that South Africa has not done enough to promote gender equity in the workplace. Though women make up half the population and constitute 47% of the total employed, they occupy only 27% of top management and 38% of senior management positions.
On the other hand, South Africa outperforms the global norm in that women occupy 36% of domestic board seats, 10% of CEO positions and 22% of CFO roles. Internationally, the averages are 23%, 6% and 18% respectively.
When it comes to MBA programmes, women’s enrolment still trails slightly behind men’s across much of Africa and South Africa on average, though this varies widely between schools. In South Africa, women make up 49% of the total 2025 MBA cohort (which includes non-South African citizens) but there is evidence that the scales are tipping in their favour.
Take Stellenbosch Business School (SBS). Twenty years ago, just 21% of its MBA graduates were women. By 2015, this figure had increased only modestly to 27%. However, the past decade has brought significant progress. In the current MBA cohort, 47% are women. The representation of black, coloured and Indian women in its MBA programme has also grown significantly, from 37% of the female MBA cohort a decade ago to 70% today.
Even so, the school’s MBA head, Tasneem Motala, says the general underrepresentation of women in MBA programmes is a concern from both a social equity and business leadership perspective.
First, it is important to reflect on why women may still be underrepresented in MBA classrooms. This is rarely due to a lack of competence or ambition, says Motala. Rather, it often stems from structural barriers, such as challenges with work-life balance, limited access to networks for funding, and sometimes confidence gaps. Addressing this imbalance is not only a matter of fairness but also of performance and impact, she says. Research consistently shows that diverse leadership teams perform better, drive innovation and make more effective decisions.
Wits Business School (WBS) has also experienced an encouraging increase in the number of women students. They now make up 54% of enrolments. MBA director Jenika Gobind says the school actively campaigns to attract more women. Besides marketing and alumni events, she says: “We often showcase women graduates at open days and orientations to encourage women to apply and register.”
Women, she says, face study challenges that men often do not. “For those with families,” she says, “the responsibility of managing dual roles can mean that, without sufficient support at home or in the workplace, their studies are frequently the first sacrifice. This highlights the importance of men and women working together to create an environment where women are supported in pursuing their education while balancing multiple responsibilities.”
WBS executive education director Leoni Grobler adds that more than 1,200 women took part in executive programmes at the school last year. Having more women students leads to “stronger, more inclusive leadership pipelines across South Africa and the continent”.
Henley Business School Africa’s student body is now 51% women — up from 20% in 2011 — and 85% black. This shift has been deliberate, dean and director Jon Foster-Pedley tells the FM.
“We designed our MBA to be both flexible (students can pause or extend studies when life intervenes) and family-friendly (families are briefed at the outset, alumni families are involved and support networks are encouraged),” he says. “That’s vital, because childcare and domestic responsibilities remain one of the greatest barriers to women’s study.”
South Africa’s skills deficit is stark: only about 7% of those who start school go on to obtain a degree, against more than 50% in the UK or Finland. And nearly half the workforce lack the skills for the jobs they do. Many get to midlife without qualifications, eroding their confidence and productivity.
Leaders should always be conscious of who’s in the room. If all the decision-makers look and talk like you, in a country as diverse as ours, why? Why is that OKok with you?
— Nomvuyo Guma
“That is why our focus has been on making management education practical, flexible and inclusive,” says Foster-Pedley.
“Women benefit because barriers are lowered. Men benefit too: they develop resilience, empathy and inclusive leadership skills. Companies benefit most of all because they get leaders who can actually perform in today’s complex environment.”
He believes the solution to raising women’s representation at senior levels is multipronged and should include:
- Greater transparency in search and nomination processes;
- Mentorship and sponsorship, especially by men in senior positions, to open doors for women;
- Regulatory enforcement of diversity codes with consequences for noncompliance; and
- Management training for men and women alike. (Women need equitable access to leadership development, and men must adapt to workplaces where power is more distributed and collaborative.)
“This is not about favouring one gender over the other; it is about Africa using all its available talent,” Foster-Pedley says. “Inclusive leadership is not political correctness — it is good economics.”
At the Management College of Southern Africa (Mancosa), the gender composition of the MBA has also shifted. In the past few years, women have increased their share from roughly parity to about 55% of its MBA enrolment. Here, too, the majority are black.
This means the Mancosa MBA is actively feeding the leadership pipeline with more diverse voices, experiences and perspectives — a vital step towards shaping an inclusive economy, says business school manager Aradhana Ramnund-Mansingh.
Like other schools, Mancosa recognises that women often face challenges in pursuing advanced qualifications, particularly in balancing professional and family commitments.
It believes its “flexible, supported online MBA model” responds to these realities by providing students access to live and recorded webinars and full support from subject matter experts, among other things.
This model allows students, women and men alike, to integrate learning into their lives without compromising academic rigour, says Ramnund-Mansingh. “It is not about creating gender-specific strategies; it’s about creating equitable access that reflects the complex roles modern professionals occupy.”
Similarly, SBS recognises that women continue to face barriers in both corporate leadership and in entrepreneurship, ranging from limited access to networks and capital to persistent structural expectations around work-life balance.
To address these challenges, it introduced a blended (hybrid) MBA delivery format in 2017, well before online education became the norm. This flexible structure enables individuals, particularly working mothers, to take minimal time away from their families as there are only three on-campus residency periods over two years.
Given how tough it is to climb the corporate ladder, especially for women, it remains a luxury for many to pause and embark on a mid-career MBA. One who did is Nomvuyo Guma, a former chief director at the National Treasury and co-chair of the government’s delivery unit, Operational Vulindlela. She resigned last year to do a master of public administration degree at Harvard University.
Speaking from the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Guma says the step has offered her a fresh perspective as well as an opportunity for rejuvenation and to broaden her professional network. The experience will be familiar to women MBA graduates who have taken time off from their careers to study.
“You can’t really take a step back and critically evaluate the experiences you’ve had while you’re still living them,” she says. “Being able to dispassionately review what worked, what didn’t, how you’d do things differently or better is a valuable pursuit and will ultimately make you a better leader.”
In her experience, people in leadership positions spend more of their time coaching and mentoring to help their team develop than on their own development. She is also enthused by the new network she is creating among her classmates, who come from all over the world and from many different walks of life.
“Typically, one tends to meet people in the same field, but an advanced degree allows you to meet and form relationships with a much more diverse group and exposes you to new ways of thinking that can only enhance your performance,” she says.
Guma is proof of progress in getting women into executive leadership positions in South Africa, especially in government, where they occupy 59% of all posts and 46% of parliamentary seats. But what about the rest of Africa?
The continent has had roughly a dozen women presidents, but corporate Africa still has few women in executive roles. Too many board seats are filled through opaque, male-dominated networks. Governance codes, while they encourage gender diversity, are often weakly enforced.
The Association of African Business Schools (AABS) wants its members to increase the number of women able to fill senior roles across the continent. It also wants African schools to promote senior women representation in their own ranks.
The association is starting to set an example. Until recently, women accounted for fewer than a quarter of AABS board members, but its constitution has been amended to require at least 40% women board membership over the coming three years — that’s a minimum of three out of seven board members.
“We chose a minimum of 40% because it is both a global benchmark and a meaningful threshold,” says past chair Foster-Pedley. “At that level, women’s voices are no longer tokenised but genuinely shape board decisions.”
AABS’s executive director and senior staff team are all women. “This demonstrates that the 40% rule is a starting point, not a ceiling,” he adds. “It has already shifted the dynamic, widened the pipeline and given us access to talent we were previously overlooking. But this is not just about women. For men, too, the message is clear: leadership is evolving.
“Collaboration, emotional intelligence and adaptability are no longer optional extras but core skills,” argues Foster-Pedley. “Men who cannot work inclusively and who rely on outdated hierarchical models will struggle in the leadership teams of the future.”
Anita Bosch, SBS’s Women at Work research chair, notes that “many men are socialised to suppress emotional expression and instead maintain a stoic, competitive façade”. She adds: “A number of business and world leaders come to mind. This can result in leaders who are emotionally distant from the very people they are meant to serve.”
Women in leadership programmes have emerged in response to the persistent underrepresentation of women in senior leadership roles. These initiatives are designed to empower women to flourish in organisational cultures that do not embrace gender inclusivity. However, Mancosa’s Ramnund-Mansingh laments that too often such programmes offer little more than short courses, panel discussions and certificates of attendance.
“While these may look impressive on paper, they seldom translate into meaningful organisational change,” she says. “Without practical application, these initiatives risk being more performative than transformative.”
What is missing, she says, is context and lived practice. In her view, readiness for leadership comes from on-the-job mentoring and job-shadowing, which allow women to observe and participate in real decision-making. It also requires effective peer and emotional support systems, which recognise the balancing act many women must perform, as well as stretch assignments and developmental roles, which create “safe spaces” in which women can experiment, learn and grow.
Organisations need leaders, regardless of gender, who are emotionally intelligent, attuned to their environments, and courageous enough to advocate for the collective good.
— Anita Bosch
“The true measure of success for women’s leadership initiatives lies not in certificates earned, but in career progression, retention and the creation of ecosystems where women sponsor and support one another,” says Ramnund-Mansingh. “Until then, many women in leadership programmes will remain more about optics than impact.”
Even so, Guma, a graduate of one such leadership programme, says she found the experience “immensely useful”. She says: “For women, there can be cultural conditioning that makes it difficult to step into certain leadership roles. I found this women-only environment a safe space to explore these things and think about how to lead confidently, authentically and in an unapologetically feminine way.”
As to whether these programmes increase the number of women in senior positions, she feels it’s important to realise that they are just a small part of a larger ecosystem. Barriers to greater representation of women at senior levels are many and varied.
“The answer to this doesn’t lie in sending women on some kind of special training programme, it lies in everyone realising that the responsibility for ensuring that there is adequate women’s representation at every level is a shared one,” says Guma. “Men need to be part of this conversation and much more active allies. For me, the issue actually goes beyond gender, to diversity in all its forms. Leaders should always be conscious of who’s in the room. If all the decision-makers look and talk like you, in a country as diverse as ours, why? Why is that OK with you?”
From an institutional perspective, women often feel more comfortable in spaces where they see other women represented. Several business schools canvassed for this piece say most of their full-time faculty are women, which promotes a sense of belonging, visibility and aspiration for women students.
However, SBS’s Motala emphasises that improving the gender balance is not just about increasing the number of women in the room. “It’s equally essential to create an environment where women feel included, supported and empowered, so they can fully engage with the MBA experience and step confidently into leadership roles thereafter,” she says.
An MBA classroom, particularly through syndicate group work, provides a supportive environment where diverse perspectives can be heard. “We create a space where men can gain insight into the lived experiences of their women peers, and where both women and men can explore how leadership styles, communication, and decision-making are interpreted across gender lines,” says Motala. “These experiences foster mutual respect, empathy and inclusive leadership skills that carry into the workplace.”
The bottom line, says Bosch, is that “organisations need leaders, regardless of gender, who are emotionally intelligent, attuned to their environments and courageous enough to advocate for the collective good”.
In short, “true leadership often requires vulnerability, and the willingness to take a principled stand, even when it feels uncomfortable”. Such individuals are rare and such qualities go way beyond gender but, if the changing gender composition of MBA programmes is any guide, the scales are tipping in women’s favour. An increase in the number of women in leadership roles can’t be far behind.
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