Conference Agenda

In 2022 the World Bank ranked South Africa as the most unequal country in the world. The gap between the most privileged and least privileged in South Africa also manifests in mental health inequalities. Globally, less than 20% of the people who need mental health treatment have access to such treatment. In South Africa, less than 8% of the mentally ill receive the treatment they need. South Africa also has the 6th highest femicide rate in the world and gender-based violence has been cited as a pandemic by the President of South Africa. As feminist economists we advocate for a more just society – social, economic, criminal, and temporal justice. We argue that gender-based violence and mental health inequalities are public health crises.

The papers in this session include evidence of worsening maternal and adolescent mental health after the loss of a Child Support Grant, as well as analysis of the link between unpaid work, temporal injustice, and mental health. Gender-based violence in South Africa is argued as a public health crisis with long-term health consequences, as well as negative macroeconomic consequences. The final paper is an econometric analysis of the differential impact of a loss of a partner on the mental health of men and women.

Cash transfers are among the poverty-alleviating programmes associated with improving mental health. The programmes provide financial assistance that the beneficiary families may utilise to meet basic needs. However, the potential impact on mental health when individuals are no longer eligible for continued financial support is not well-documented. This study examines the impact of the negative income shock generated by aging out of the child support grant (CSG) on the mental health of adolescents and their parents in South Africa. Difference-in-differences with multiple periods method is used to analyse data obtained from the longitudinal South African National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) from 2008 to 2017. The results show aging out of the CSG increases the risk of depression by 47% and 59 % in adolescents and mothers respectively. In addition, aging out of the CSG decreases the level of life satisfaction by 18% in adolescents. Overall, the impact of aging out of the CSG on mental health is significant in adolescents and mothers, and not significant in fathers. These findings suggest that financial support should be complemented by non-financial support like counselling to reduce the mental health impact among the beneficiary families after they phase out of the programme.

The magnitude of the gap between the discretionary time enjoyed by the most privileged and the least privileged is a measure of temporal injustice. Globally, women spend more time on unpaid work, in addition to their paid work, than men do. School and pre-school closures during the height of the Pandemic led to an increase of 512 billion hours of unpaid work globally for women. The injustice of unpaid work was, however, a significant global problem before the Covid pandemic and it continues to be a problem now.

Time poverty and the drudgery of unpaid work have been linked to depressive symptoms and/or psychological distress. The intersectionality of inequalities matters because in addition to women doing more unpaid work than men, lower-income women spend more hours on unpaid work than higher-income women who have the means to employ domestic workers and/or nannies. Furthermore a migrant woman may have less family support in the foreign country where she works than she did in her home country, which could increase her time poverty further. Lower-income women are thus at higher risk of mental distress related to time poverty.

Previous research using South African time-use survey data from 2000 and 2010 showed that absolute time-poor individuals were predominantly young unmarried black women in South Africa. This paper uses South African panel data from 2008 to 2017 to analyze the incidence of depressive symptoms and psychological distress in women who face multiple inequalities that result in these women experiencing levels of time poverty higher than privileged individuals in South Africa.

In 2020 the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, said that "South Africa is in the grip of two pandemics - the coronavirus pandemic and the scourge of gender-based violence and femicide."

In 2021, South Africa was ranked 6th in the world for its femicide rate, which is five times the global average. The femicide rate in South Africa during 2017/2018 was equivalent to a woman being murdered every 3 hours in South Africa, and every 8 hours by an intimate partner. Femicide and sexual violence increased at a higher rate than the overall murder rate from 2020 to 2022.

The World Health Organization has classified GBV as a public health issue. GBV has the following long-term public health consequences - chronic pain, sexually transmitted infections as well as mental health problems like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. GBV also has intergenerational health consequences. A public health crisis can be defined as much by their health consequences as by their causes and precipitating events. The health consequences of GBV in South Africa have the potential to overwhelm routine community capabilities to address them.

The significantly high rates of GBV in combination with the systemic failures of the South African criminal justice system to keep perpetrators accountable has led to a dire situation. Despite the fact that South Africa holds one of the most progressive and comprehensive constitutions in the world, this has not translated to a significant change in the incidence of GBV in South Africa. We argue that GBV in South Africa should be classified as a public health crisis in order to improve policy interventions by governments, businesses, social institutions, NGOs, civil society and communities in addressing GBV.

At the end of their lifetimes, 35 % of women globally would have experienced violence, either from a family member, an intimate partner or a non-intimate partner. This means that countries across the globe will have to deal with the immense economic and social costs, to victims, families, communities, and societies that incur as the result of the abuse of women. Whether direct or indirect (tangible or intangible) these costs have a significant impact on economies' productivity, growth and thus the welfare of citizens. It is therefore important to calculate the actual costs of gender-based violence to be able to further strengthen the case that it is not just an individual micro-level problem, but a macro-level issue that affects the economy and that thus has to be dealt with. This study, therefore, investigates the costs of sexual and gender-based violence using South Africa as a case study. The study adopts a feminist perspective on the topic to provide a deeper understanding that the costs of GBV go beyond the loss of paid productivity to the unpaid productivity related to the care and reproductive work conducted mostly by women.

The loss of a partner, whether through death or separation, is one of the most devastating traumas that one can experience. For some individuals, the effects of this loss may only last in the short term, while others may take much longer to recover. Research, mostly from developed countries, finds that women face a greater burden than men after separation, and that women will take longer to recover from such a trauma. In this paper, we explore the impact of the loss of a partner using longitudinal data from South Africa, a country with high levels of mortality, separation, and divorce. We estimate the differential impact of a loss of a partner on the mental health of men and women using the CES-D10 score, capturing depressive symptoms. In order to ensure that we are estimating the causal impact, we utilise the longitudinal nature of the data and a Mundlak approach, which allows us to control for time-invariant unobserved factors. We find that the loss of a partner affect women and men differently, with the initial impact and the persistency of the impact being more severe for women. However, we find a delayed effect for men, and explore various reasons for why this may be.