A Research Report submitted in partial fulfilment of a Master of Arts in Industrial Sociology by coursework and Research Report. Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand. 15 March 2016 / The aim of this study is to understand the experiences of male nurses as they work in women-dominated workplace. The focus of other studies has been on: the ‘glass escalator’ and the hidden advantages for men in the so called ‘female’ professions; masculinity at work; the experiences of men in female dominated occupations and the experiences of men in caring professions. In South Africa, many studies on masculinity have been carried out that focus on the gender issues of southern Africa such as, causes and prevention of intimate partner violence; young men and the construction of masculinity, implications for HIV/AIDS, conflict, and violence; contemporary masculinities particularly the gendered cultural politics and hegemonic masculinities/masculinity in South African: culture, power and gender politics. But there is a dearth of literature on the issue of men in gender concentrated occupations, like nursing, in South Africa. This study seeks to fill the gap in understanding of how South African men experience their masculine gender identity in the context of engaging in work which is supposedly feminine by employing a qualitative, semi-structured interview approach of 15 male nurses of a hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. This study argues that male nurses tend to portray hegemonic masculinity as their gender identity is simultaneously being configured, misconfigured and reconfigured in the workplace. / MT2017

A report on a research study presented to the Department of Social Work School of Human and Community Development, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirement for a degree Master of Arts in Social Work, March 2017 / This research report explores how male Wits university students, who are actively involved in SASCO, a student organisation that advocates for amongst other things, none sexist society, perceive gender transformation and equality. The research approach utilised was qualitative and exploratory in nature with a broad aim of explaining the perceptions of the male students. Informal interaction and semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with ten male student activists and a key informant as methods of data collection. The data, in the form of interview transcripts was than analysed using the IPA approach. Although the participant’s perceptions of gender transformation and equality varied, it was evident, however, that all of the participants agreed that women have been previously and currently disadvantaged in society. The main findings that show the concepts of gender transformation and equality are much more digestible on paper and policies but difficult to implement. It becomes unreasonable to aspect individuals when they get into institutions of higher learning to now unlearn patriarchy and disown patriarchal privileges and benefits that they have enjoyed for most of the lives. The introduction of sustainable gender transformation and equality needs a complete overhaul of gendered societies and societal injustices. Gender injustices should be afforded the same attention that is given to economic inequalities, access to education and political instabilities. / XL2018

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Education, 2011

A research report submitted to the School of Governance, University of Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment (25%) of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management (Public and Development Management) Johannesburg, 2016 / Gender inequality persists in artisan employment in South Africa as males continue to outnumber females significantly in artisan employment and the trends point to highly gendered industry participation. Females who manage to enter artisan occupations in the highly gendered workplace are faced with historically ingrained attitudes of males towards females. Discriminatory practices, social norms and persistent stereotypes shape the females’ learning experience. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to explore the learning experiences of female artisans in the South Africa automotive industry, during the work-based phase of their apprenticeship. A qualitative exploratory research study approach was adopted using semi-structured face–to-face interviews. Fourteen female apprentices, learnership candidates and artisans were interviewed, including two industry training experts. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used. The findings revealed that the general experiences of the female participants were challenging. The quality of learning they received is not equal to that of their male counterparts and the workplace culture consists of prejudice, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, stereotypes and barriers to employment. Interestingly, the participants were uncritical of the experience of gender discrimination, although, they were very critical of racial discrimination. This suggests a need to conduct and create awareness sessions about gender discrimination in the industry for both genders. / MT 2017

The primary focus of the research is to explore the narratives and subjective meanings of black economically empowered women (BEEW) about black men’s perceptions about BEEW. The researcher explored the experiences of these women and identified some of the challenges that they may face as a result of such experiences. The theoretical frameworks used are based on the theories of empowerment and the Black Feminist theories, with both attempting to explore black women’s experiences. This study is exploratory and qualitative in nature, with the focus on the BEEW’s subjective experiences which were gathered from each of the individuals who participated in this study. The interviews conducted were individual and face-to-face. The purposive sampling method was used to select the participants and all ethical considerations such as confidentiality and informed consent were taken into account. The findings of the research suggest that BEEW tend to have similar experiences in relation to most black men perceiving them as threatening and emasculating. Many participants also experienced both internal and external struggles as a result of their economic empowerment. In addition, the study also suggests that most BEEW are not intending to emasculate men, but are rather searching for relationships that are collaborative and that acknowledge each other’s strengths. Due to the small sample, generalizability of this study is limited. / MT2016

Research report in the Masters of Management in Public Policy, 2016 / This research assesses the challenges and prospects of the South African ‘Women Empowerment and Gender Equality (WEGE) Bill’. The bill, passed by the National Council of Provinces in March, 2014 seeks to reinforce rights and opportunities in advancing gender equality and women empowerment in the country. The scope of this study is national and uses scenario planning to explore the future of the WEGE Bill through reviewing fifteen written parliamentary submissions and eighteen questionnaires. Questionnaires were distributed to representatives from government, civil society organisations and the private sector. The findings of the study revealed that while South Africa has made great legal and policy strides in advancing gender equality, a lot still needs to be done to realise that end. The promulgation of the new WEGE Bill has also not provided sufficient justification or prospects for any greater impact in addressing gender inequalities more than any other existing laws or policies would. Greater political will and more robust processes of consultation and stakeholder engagement are essential to making decisions on future gender equality policy making. / MT2017

M.A. (Clinical Psychology), University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities / In 1996 South Africa was the first country in the world to protect sexual minorities from discrimination in its Constitution. The benefits of a liberal constitution cannot go unacknowledged, however, negotiating lesbian identity within the work context is still a challenge due to the pervasive stigma attached to homosexuality, as well as the remnants of South Africa’s stormy, oppressive political history. Lesbian woman in South Africa grow up in a society which remains predominantly patriarchal and conservatively religious and where the heterosexual assumption, the idea that one is ‘straight’ unless otherwise stated, is continually confirmed and perpetuated in a variety of contexts, including the occupational environment. It is within this setting that lesbian women woman must attempt to negotiate and continually, in varying degrees, and not always by choice, take part in the coming out process in different social spaces. In interviews with seven self-identified lesbian women, the dynamic process of coming out within the occupational environment, was explored in relation to and within relevant cultural, historical, familial and social contexts. All participants had disclosed their sexual identity within the work place, in varying degrees. Key aims of the research were exploring the negotiation of lesbian identity in various occupational contexts as well as identifying strategies used to negotiate the work environment and lesbian identity / MT2017

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management by Research (MMR). Johannesburg, October 2016 / The plight of the female manager as a result of gender inequality has been thoroughly documented within academic research. A well-known metaphor of this inequality is the “glass-ceiling”, a phenomenon where a female manager’s career is stymied by an invisible barrier. While the barrier takes on the characteristics of glass by being subtle, women can observe positions, but are unable to attain them because of gender discrimination. The research objective was to examine career strategies to overcome the “glass-ceiling” challenges. This empirical project contributes to the literature on gender in management by introducing a novel theory, marketing mix, when understanding the idea of a career strategy. A theoretical contribution has also been made to marketing theory in that it has been expanded by being applied to individuals, which is an unusual sample as the majority of studies on this theory have been largely conducted on organisations. A qualitative research methodology was used. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 female managers participating in a leadership development programme from a State Owned Company (SOC). Key results were consistent that strategies of overcoming the “glass-ceiling” were the importance of having a professional persona, negotiating remuneration, benefits of belonging to informal networks, and the benefits of having a mentor. The researcher found that female mangers apply career strategies in order to succeed; however, these tactics were applied in silos and not holistically. These behaviours then became ineffective / GR2018

Sports and its effects on children have been researched for the benefits that it may bring. The purpose of this study is to see if sports competency, assessed by both peer reports and self-reports, benefits both boys and girls and whether it protects children who generally are gender-atypical from adjustment difficulties and also to see if there are any interactive influences of cross-gender typing and sports competency on self-esteem, depression, and other adjustment indexes. Our results found that there was a significant interaction between sports competence and cross-gender typing when looking at popularity and also a significant interaction between sports self-efficacy and cross-gender typing when looking at self-esteem. Our data did not provide sufficient support for our buffering hypothesis, but it allowed for us to conclude that self-esteem of low-cross-gender-typed children profit more from high sports self-efficacy and suffer more from low sports self-efficacy than the self-esteem of high-cross-gender-typed children. / by Arian Frias. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation uses the case of Pakistan to argue that the compatibility of shari'a and democracy depends on the design of institutions through which Islamist moral arguments are processed and which shape their interaction with liberal detractors. Instead of extrapolating Islamist intentions from theoretical tracts deemed canonical or from their official statements, this dissertation examines the link between ideas and institutions by mining a wide-range of English and Urdu-language texts from Pakistani courts, parliament, law journals, the advisory Council of Islamic Ideology and Women's Status Commissions, transnational rights advocacy NGO and Islamist publications, newspapers and TV debates, and 40-years of articles on democracy and state Islamic lawmaking from two leading madrassa journals. An analysis of 3 case studies of Islamic lawmaking reveals that the judiciary has been able to foster "authentic deliberation" between liberals and Islamists (which Guttman and Thompson define as reciprocal reasoning with civility and respect), leading to the moral accommodation of Islamists in the constitutional democratic order as well as steady advances in constitutionally-guaranteed fundamental rights. However, deliberation through political institutions - a legislature dominated by the executive branch, which has been alternately controlled by military dictators and civilian heads of internally undemocratic political parties - has led groups in power to pass desired laws without giving the minority side reasons internal to their moral framework, leading the losing side to declare the law "un-Islamic" and to later collaborate with military rulers to attain their desired change. By adopting the lens of "internal" vs. "external" reasoning to analyze the moral deliberation between liberals and Islamists during episodes of Islamic lawmaking, which is used by scholars of moral and political theory, particularly in the deliberative democracy tradition, I am able to suspend judgment about the content of Islamist positions. This allows me to show that their moral critique of liberalism is directed at the kind of liberalism advocated by transnational rights NGOs, which John Gray has described as the conception of liberalism as a "rational consensus on values," and that they have been the most ardent champions of what Gray has termed "modus vivendi" liberalism and which is indeed the arrangement embodied in Pakistan's constitutional and legal system, which has a dual commitment to shari'a and individual rights. Particularly, from 1978-85, there was a major structural shift in judicial reasoning when the mechanism of "Islamic judicial review" was introduced through shari'a courts, which were empowered to strike down laws as un-Islamic on citizen petition, or on their own initiative, and which were staffed by a minority of `ulama and a majority of common law judges, who were compelled to reason within the fiqh tradition (and depart from consensus-based opinions of the fuqaha only as a last resort, if there was no way to reconcile them with modern circumstances). From the accounts of legal scholars, the constitutional role granted to shari'a since the 1980s has led to a liberalization of colonial-era laws, while the judiciary has continued its steady expansion of women's rights in Muslim divorce law and in areas of law that do not entail a direct conflict with fiqh-based provisions. Superior court judges have pursued this liberalism through "creative compromise;" in public statements they have affirmed the constitution's commitment to gender equality but when dealing with the fiqh tradition, they pursue gender equality as a legal effect (pragmatism) rather than as a premise on the basis of which the fiqh tradition should be "reconstructed." While the latter is a Muslim modernist position and has been the demand of transnational rights advocacy NGOs since the 1980s, "gender equality" was never recognized as a premise in the fiqh tradition, much like other moral and religious traditions which posit the family as the basic social unit, and derive the mutual rights and duties of men and women from their role in the family. Contrary to the common representation of Islamists, in-depth evidence from Pakistan, especially in the last decade when judicial and media independence increased, shows that the main `ulama and Islamist electoral parties have shown flexibility in their positions, sometimes appropriating long-standing demands of women's rights campaigners for their own electoral platforms (to prove that they are women-friendly), while western-funded rights advocacy NGOs have maintained their original position that gender equality must be used as a premise to re-frame all laws, including fiqh-based laws.