During South Africa's Women's Month, women who lead companies, create businesses, and shape public policy are celebrated. However, upon closer examination of the highest levels of corporate and entrepreneurial life, a contradiction becomes apparent: while women's talent is becoming increasingly visible, their advancement often stalls before reaching the top.
Traditionally, explanations for this phenomenon have been attributed to workplace discrimination, unequal access to capital, and the concentration of women in sectors with low growth potential. Although all these factors are real, there is another barrier that remains in plain sight: the unpaid mental, emotional, and logistical labor that many women perform before, during, and after official working hours.
Before a woman becomes a leader or founder, she often simultaneously fulfills multiple roles: a daughter coordinating parental care; a sister maintaining family ties; a wife managing emotional labor in a partnership; a mother monitoring child development; and also a household manager, financial manager, and health coordinator—tracking records, budgets, medications, and logistics that rarely cease during the workday.
Even if physical duties are divided or outsourced, she is often the person expected to remember, anticipate, and coordinate these tasks. Only after completing all of this does she arrive at the roles for which she is paid: as an employee or business owner—and ultimately, as an individual.
This burden is not merely about being busy; it depletes specific cognitive resources essential for high performance. Repeated small decisions across various roles lead to decision fatigue, which reduces the capacity for complex strategic choices at the most critical moments. Constant switching between caregiving and work fragments attention, hindering access to the sustained focus required for strategic work.
Emotional care—for children, aging parents, partners—drains the same reserves needed for conflict management, team motivation, and maintaining composure under professional pressure. Financial and family concerns continue to operate as a background mental process throughout the day, constituting a form of 'mental load' that persists even when the tasks themselves are delegated.
The consequences are professional, not just personal. Women may have less time and energy for networking, developing leadership skills, and participating in high-visibility assignments, which often influence promotion decisions. These caregiving responsibilities also tend to intensify in the years when many professionals are striving for leadership positions—through raising children and, increasingly, caring for aging parents within the 'sandwich generation.'
Female entrepreneurs face similar disadvantages. Time spent coordinating care is unavailable for product development, market expansion, and investor relations. Funding systems can exacerbate this deficit if they interpret constant availability, extensive travel, or after-hours event attendance as evidence of commitment. This creates a system that can mistakenly equate freedom from caregiving duties with ambition.
Technology can reduce the administrative friction around each of these roles through targeted use. For household coordination, shared calendars and platforms like Cozi or FamilyWall can move responsibilities out of one person's memory and make them visible to the entire family. For financial management, tools like 22seven or automated payments reduce repetitive administrative work that would otherwise fall on one household financial manager.
In healthcare coordination, telemedicine, digital health records, and medication reminder apps simplify tracking appointments and caring for children and elderly parents. For daily logistics, grocery delivery services and meal planning apps can eliminate hours of manual weekly planning. Regarding professional and entrepreneurial roles, planning tools, cloud collaboration platforms, CRM systems, automated invoicing, and responsible AI use can reduce repetitive administrative burdens.
Virtual participation in conferences, training, and networking can also expand access to commercial and developmental opportunities for those whose caregiving duties restrict travel. With consistent application across all these roles, the recovered time is not insignificant—it often equals several working days per month. However, the most valuable benefit is not that women can fit more tasks into an already overloaded day. It is that they can reclaim precious attention for strategic thinking, rest, learning, relationships, and work that genuinely contributes to career and business growth. Technology should create space for life and leadership, not generate the expectation that women must become infinitely more productive.
This distinction matters. Technology cannot revise unequal partnerships, ensure affordable childcare, or convince workplaces to stop rewarding presence. Furthermore, access to it is unevenly distributed. Data costs, unreliable connectivity, subscription fees, and varying levels of digital literacy mean that women bearing the heaviest burdens may be the least effective users of assistive tools. There is also a deeper risk: if the responsibility for each role remains unchanged, digital tools may only make women more efficient managers of an unfair division of labor. A shared family calendar is only useful if responsibility is truly shared. Automation can reduce the task, but it cannot decide who should perform it.
Employers who want to see more women in leadership must look beyond ceremonial campaigns and examine how the work itself is designed. Flexible schedules must be genuine and career-safe. Productivity must be measured by contribution and results, not by desk visibility or 24/7 availability. Support must explicitly recognize eldercare alongside childcare. Women must also be actively sponsored for complex assignments and network influence—opportunities they may lack the time to seek out independently. Investors and funds must reconsider criteria that reward unlimited availability and may include practical operational support in funding packages, easing the exact type of administrative load described above.
At home, redistribution is more important than assistance. Partners and family members must jointly take on the functions of anticipation, remembering, and organizing across all these roles, rather than simply executing tasks assigned to the person who remains the primary project manager of the household. At the national level, investments in affordable childcare, eldercare, connectivity, and digital skills remain critically important to ensure these tools reach the women who need them most. Women do not need another message to work harder. Their capability, ambition, and resilience are already evident in all the roles listed. The question is whether our homes, workplaces, funding systems, and technologies will consume this capability through invisible labor. In this Women's Month, progress should be measured not only by how many women reach the boardroom, but also by whether the burden they carried to get there has finally become visible—and whether society is ready to share it.
Women's Day in South Africa, celebrated on August 9th, is the result of a collective movement and expression led and supported by women themselves. The annual Women's Day, recognized both nationally and internationally (March 8th), aims to promote more equitable societies where women can live, lead, and thrive as equals.
Discussions surrounding Women's Day can sometimes seem superficial or bleak. Many annual reflections focus on the issues that women and girls in South Africa continue to face, such as partner violence, gender-based violence, harassment, and workplace discrimination, as well as obstacles to education and employment.
These critical issues affect the physical and psychological safety of women, as well as their ability to contribute to societal and economic development. However, to realize women's potential in society, it is necessary to look beyond these risks and barriers and consider other social changes needed for women and girls to truly flourish.
One initial step is recognizing the central and often unseen role women play in maintaining broader ecosystems of care and support. Many women carry numerous responsibilities—they are primary breadwinners, mothers, caregivers, colleagues, and crisis managers. In South Africa, thousands of such women do this under conditions of chronic stress and financial hardship.
While this observation is not new, the subtle ways unequal norms and practices manifest are rarely discussed. The mental load associated with caregiving, as well as the uneven distribution of domestic duties and responsibilities, often begins early when girls absorb messages and expectations about how they should participate in family and societal life. Opportunities for play, exploring interests, and enjoying childhood in a safe and supportive environment are crucial for both girls and boys, but they are not always realized.
Throughout the life cycle, we also observe how many of these roles are passed down to the second generation, as mothers become grandmothers and repeat many of the same caregiving and support roles for their children's children. While multi-generational care models are often vital for maintaining households, they can also create an additional burden for women who have performed these roles for decades, and contribute to intergenerational tensions among younger household members.
These dynamics are not merely anecdotal; our own research confirms this. A team from the University of Stellenbosch Health Life Cycle Research Institute conducted joint interviews with adolescent mothers living with HIV and elderly women from their families in rural Eastern Cape to better understand their experiences of early, unintended motherhood. Through interactions with mothers, sisters, and grandmothers, these intergenerational conversations fostered mutual understanding and compassion, the exchange of personal stories, and the formulation of future hopes.
Such conversations should be encouraged not only among women. Another priority is involving boys and men in discussions about social change and gender expectations, providing them space to reflect on these differences and make positive contributions. It is worth noting that when given this opportunity, boys and men often show a willingness to participate in these conversations.
A series of dialogues called 'Conversations / Iincoko' (in isiXhosa) was recently held with children and youth aged 7 to 24 in Heylwood, bringing together boys and girls of similar ages to discuss their current realities and future aspirations. These sessions revealed many common interests, priorities, and challenges, including reflections on absent fathers and male role models. By creating spaces for boys and girls to interact, delve into complex topics, and express vulnerability, such dialogues can be a useful first step in building meaningful connections and reducing the gender gap that seems to widen as children grow up.
Even while acknowledging these relationships and responsibilities, we must pay equal attention to women as individuals, not just through the roles they play for others. The collective spirit of Women's Day in South African history can sometimes overshadow this individuality. Despite the importance of recognizing the relationships and systems in which women make and sustain critical contributions, there is an urgent need to see women as individuals from the outset.
In educational, community, and online platforms, this imperative must include providing accessible opportunities for women to develop leadership skills and participate in events that allow their unique voices to be heard and their ideas to be valued. We know that supporting women yields tangible benefits for public health and well-being, considering all that women already do. Structural barriers, invisible care work, intergenerational relationships, and individual recognition are not separate topics for discussion; all of this is part of what women will need to truly thrive.
Beyond flowers or greetings on Women's Day, those who support, live with, and work with women can make small commitments to recognizing these unequal realities and begin some of these important changes through dialogue, acknowledgment, and action.
