She believes that women themselves need to position themselves better by doing reading outside of their industry, and spending more time on looking at broader commercial issues. It is a fact that 75% of MBA classes around the world are still men. So, women need to broaden their capacity to contribute at a board level. “At end of the day, it doesn’t

matter what your gender is, you’re not going to stay there very long if you don’t contribute to the board.” Sandra Burmeister, CEO Landelahni. Another big topic in gender

equality issues focuses on the earning differences between genders. Sandra says, “Traditionally, global research shows that graduates, male and female, in all fields earn about the same, until about mid to late 20s; then men’s earnings accelerate, and women’s earnings decline”. The main reason for this is that women take time out

to raise families, and so they either exit the workplace or take on a less aggressive career focus due to other priorities. This research is now skewed because women are having children so much later in life, but the truth remains that women are going to exit the market for a period of time at some point, or spend less time on a career.

women are rising fast through the ranks of executive boards, and the promotion and development of businesswomen in South Africa is a very important strategy that all companies need to adopt. To emphasise this point, Sandra said in this interview, “Catalyst Research did a survey on Fortune 500 gender-diverse boards - all of the boards that had gender diversity performed better financially than boards that didn’t have diversity”.

And we do diversity really well in South Africa.

Overall, it is clear that