Present in solar, absent from the boardroom: SAPVIA marks Women’s Month with a call for measurable change
Seventy years after 20 000 women marched on the Union Buildings, the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association (SAPVIA) is using Women’s Month to celebrate the women building the country’s fastest-growing energy industry — and to be candid about how far that industry still has to travel.
Solar PV is the most gender-balanced corner of the global energy economy. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) puts women at 40% of the worldwide solar PV workforce, well ahead of wind (21%) and oil and gas (22%), and at 38% across Africa. South Africa lags that benchmark.
The Gender Diversity Guideline for the Renewable Energy Industry, developed jointly by SAPVIA and the South African Wind Energy Association (SAWEA), finds that women make up approximately 21% of the combined wind and solar workforce. Only 12% of engineering and technical positions and 14% of executive and senior management roles are held by women.
“Every Women’s Month we are asked to celebrate, and we should, to commemorate the bravery of the women of 1956. There are women in this industry designing substations, managing legal matters, closing project finance, running EPC businesses and commissioning rooftops in every province,” says Dr Rethabile Melamu, CEO of SAPVIA.
“Celebration without clear measurement of progress, or without intentionally opening up opportunities for women, is sentiment. Our own data tells us that women are present in solar but largely absent from the rooms where utility-scale and commercial project decisions get made. Presence is not our problem. Progression is — and progression needs a different set of interventions.”
SAPVIA’s response has been to move from advocacy to instruments. Its Gender and Economic Development Working Group, chaired by Jenelle Krishna and drawing members from across the value chain, works across four deliberately practical focus areas: gender diversity, economic development, financial inclusion and digital transformation.
Two of its interventions illustrate the approach.
The working group has developed the concept for a dedicated Women in Energy Conference, designed to place women-led businesses in front of financiers and procurement decision-makers rather than in front of one another.
It has also driven SAPVIA’s contribution to the Gender Diversity Guideline for the Renewable Energy Industry, which gives member companies practical guidance on recruitment, retention, pay parity and progression in place of aspirational targets.
The association’s Industry Awards, now in their second year, include the Woman Powering Solar Award, recognising women leading and innovating across the value chain.
Dr Melamu argues the commercial case is as strong as the moral one.
“We are heading into the largest grid and generation build South Africa has attempted in decades. Every megawatt needs engineers, technicians, project managers and financiers, and we do not have enough of them. A sector that recruits from half the population, in a country with our unemployment rate, is not being principled. It is being ineffective.”
She is equally direct about where the pipeline breaks.
“A higher percentage of girls are successfully completing high school than ever before. Women graduate, they qualify, and then they leave, because sites are not designed for them, because promotion cycles tend to be opaque, because a first child often costs a woman her seniority. Those are design faults in our workplaces, and design faults can be fixed.”
“Transformation in this sector will not be delivered by a campaign in August,” says Dr Melamu.
“It will be delivered by the employment equity measures we implement in September, by how we equip women for promotion in March, and by who we put on the ballot at our next AGM. Women’s Month is when we account for that.”
