South Africa’s unemployment rate continues to rise, with the national unemployment rate nudging up 0.6 percentage points to 33.5% for the second quarter of 2024, Statistics South Africa reported on Tuesday.
There are now 8.38-million unemployed people, an increase of 158,000. Almost half the unemployed are women (4.15-million), according to StatsSA’s latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey.
‘While both men and women have seen increases in unemployment rates across all educational categories, the data highlights a disproportionately greater impact on women,’ StatsSA says.
The unemployment rate of women graduates stood at 10.7% in the second quarter of 2024, which is higher than the 8.3% among men with similar qualifications.
There has been a significant increase among women with other tertiary qualifications in the past 10 years, with the unemployment rate jumping almost 12 percentage points from 15.1% the second quarter of 2014 to 26.9% in Q2 this year. The unemployment rate of women with a matric rose from 28.8% to 39.5%.