SA women feel like an afterthought in the services meant to serve them
· Citizen
Respondents in the First for Women’s Her and Now report titled “A World Built for Someone Else” have revealed that women are increasingly navigating systems that were designed with them in mind, yet many still feel overlooked by the very services meant to support them.
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This is the second report by First for Women insurance highlighting South African women’s thoughts and feelings. The findings were drawn from more than 6000 South African women since 2025.
Last year, the report asked, “How are you feeling?” This year, it asked whether women are already doing the work to hold their lives together, whether the products and institutions around them are lightening that load, or whether they assume women will keep coping regardless.
A world that treats women as afterthoughts
According to the report, 38% of the respondents named government services as the place they feel most like an afterthought, closely followed by banking and healthcare, both at 35.6%.
The report found that when something doesn’t work for women, most don’t wait for it to change.
56.4% switch providers or find an alternative, and a further 33.1% work around the problem on their own, a pattern that hits single parents hardest, since switching takes time and flexibility many do not have.
A world where women are seen
The report also asked where women feel completely seen. Most of the respondents said they feel seen at their local hairdresser and the neighbourhood spaza shop.
“These are the places that remember a name, a circumstance, a school run, without being asked twice.
“The gap between that experience and a call centre or a bank queue is, the report argues, a matter of design choice rather than resources,” read the report.
Most women feel unsafe
90.1% of the respondents say they never or rarely feel safe walking alone after dark, a figure that barely shifts between rural and urban areas.
First for Women Senior Manager of Insights and Research Initiatives, Reitumetse Mpholle, said only 6% of respondents felt safe after dark last year.
“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,” she noted.
The report found that safety has a price. 79.5% of women say safety concerns have cost them money, and higher earners spend considerably more in real terms, even though lower-income women are forced to make that trade-off far more often.
A financial system built around a payslip she has never had
Money remains the single biggest source of stress for South African women, and this year’s research looked for the arithmetic behind it. 32.8% of women say they often run short before the end of the month, and 47.9% have had to borrow from family or friends in the last year to get by. Single parents carry a disproportionate share of that strain.
Mpholle said the women were asked what financial product they wished existed; the same answer surfaced again and again across hundreds of open responses.
“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. Meanwhile, women have built their own systems to fill the gap.
“The stokvel, in every variation imaginable, is the financial hack women describe most often when asked what keeps their household going and when a financial product does fail her, half of all women turn to family first before any formal lender.”
A household that assumes a partner who shares the load
The report found that even when a partner is present in the home and could be sharing the work, 75.8% of women say they still handle cooking and cleaning largely alone, and 69.2% say the same for laundry.
Mpholle said a partner’s income clearly changes how the financial burden is shared, given that 47.6% of women are already the primary or an equal earner in their household.
“It does far less to change who keeps the household running day to day, and for single mothers, both the money and the domestic load fall entirely 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.”
A day’s worth of work that no one accounts for
The report highlighted that 36.0% of women spend five hours or more a day on unpaid domestic and care work, a figure that climbs to 48.4% among mothers of children under five.
“That labour goes almost entirely unrecognised,” said Mpholle.
“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.
“Asked what would happen if they simply stopped for a month, the answers make clear how much rests on this invisible foundation, from a family member’s care going unmet to a household’s income falling short.”