For women in South Africa, working until dark is not an option

One evening in Johannesburg, South Africa’s biggest city, Sikhanyisiwe Ndlove finished cleaning a client’s home in the affluent Sandton district and faced a difficult choice: travel all the way across town back to her home in the inner-city neighbourhood of Hillbrow in the dark or remain where she was. “It was so dangerous that once I asked to sleep at the home of a female client rather than risk commuting back to Hillbrow at night,” says the 20-year-old mother of one.

Without a high-school certificate, Ndlove says her job options are limited. Through SweepSouth, South Africa’s leading on-demand platform for domestic services, she finds cleaning work in homes around the city. “The earnings from sweeping carpets, dusting beds, cleaning kitchens are life-changing,” she says. “With just one month’s salary, I could finally afford epilepsy medicine for my mum.” 

But the app can only find her work; it cannot guarantee every journey home is safe. Many women in South Africa live with this dilemma. App-based work offers the 5 million unemployed 15–34-year-olds one route into earning an income. Women, however, have fewer safe hours and places in which to accept jobs, considering the risk of sexual assault or other abuse by men. A recent study of Uber drivers in Johannesburg found that women tend to restrict themselves to daylight hours and familiar areas due to safety concerns, limiting how much they could earn.

Earning less to stay safe

Shayleen Zaba, 28, mother of one and Uber driver in Khayelitsha, one of Cape Town’s biggest townships, knows that trade-off all too well. For a long time, Zaba says, she did not have a job at all. Then, not too long ago, her cousin working in Dubai bought a sedan and asked her to use it for Uber. Now the income helps her to buy food, save a little and even plan her return to the college degree she abandoned in 2023 because she could not afford the fees. “Thrilling as it may be, as a female Uber driver, I limit my working hours to daytime,” she says. “Even in daytime, I can’t pick up passengers in several suburbs.”

Zaba states she earns around 9,000 South African rand a month (around € 480), while some male drivers in her WhatsApp group can make about twice as much. She does not describe this difference as a general gender gap, but as the price of avoiding night-time hours and certain routes she considers too dangerous. “Uber drivers are sitting ducks, easy picks,” she says, referring to robberies, hijackings and attacks faced by e-hailing drivers.

Safety beyond the app

Ndlove faces a different kind of risk. Two years ago, she says, a male client she found through the app tried to grope her while she cleaned his home. She later filed a police report. Ndlove as well as other women cleaners have since developed their own safety system outside the platform. In a WhatsApp group, they share the location of each home they enter. “We send a location tag with one green mark to say: home entered, all good, starting work,” Ndlove says. “On exiting the house after cleaning, we send two green marks.” A string of red X emojis means danger. Friends then call repeatedly to check whether help is needed.

Zingiswa Losi, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, points to another disadvantage. Platform work rewards availability: workers who cannot quickly accept a job may lose opportunities or risk lower ratings. For women in charge of childcare, the promised flexibility of gig work is less equal than it appears. “Male gig workers don’t have this structural disadvantage,” Losi says.

While gig platforms have opened doors that were previously closed for women like Ndlove and Zaba, they have since learned that access to work and access to safe work are not always the same thing. For Ndlove, the app may bring her the job – but the women in her WhatsApp group are what get her through it.

Winile Ximba is a freelance journalist in South Africa, mainly covering climate change and the energy transition in Africa. 
winileximba2023@gmail.com