On 9 August 1956, more than 20,000 women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria against the extension of apartheid pass laws to women. Out of that day came a phrase that has outlived the system it was aimed at: “You strike a woman, you strike a rock.” Seventy years later, South Africa marks Women’s Month 2026 under the theme “Building Resilient Economies for All.” I’d argue that phrase is less a tribute now than an instruction: you don’t build a resilient economy on half a workforce. And in my industry — tooling — that’s still, more or less, what we’re doing.
To the uninformed, tooling isn’t glamorous. Nobody grows up dreaming of becoming a mould finisher. But it’s foundational. Every pressed metal panel, injection-moulded component and precision part in South African manufacturing — cars, planes, the stuff on supermarket shelves — passes through a toolmaker’s hands first. Our Chinese friends have coined a phrase: “Tooling is the Mother Industry” – everything flows from it. And like most of South Africa’s technical economy, we have a demographic problem we can’t keep filing under “someday.”
The timing makes this more urgent, not less. Stats SA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey, released this week, put South Africa’s unemployment rate at 33.6% for the second quarter of 2026 — up from 32.7%, with 345,000 more people out of work. Women fared worse: their unemployment rate sits at 37.5%, well above that national average, with 4.4 million women now unemployed. Manufacturing shed 15,000 jobs over the same quarter. And yet our members still can’t find enough qualified toolmakers. That’s not a contradiction — it’s a mismatch. We don’t have too few jobs in this trade. We have too few people trained to fill them, and nowhere near enough of those people are women.
Here’s another number that should also worry us: women make up just 16% of registered engineering professionals in South Africa — not because they aren’t graduating with the right qualifications, but because of what happens after: who gets mentored, who gets put up for the senior role, who never gets invited into a workshop culture built without her in mind. As one industry leader put it, the problem was never a shortage of talented women in engineering. It’s a shortage of people willing to back them once they’re in the room.
I don’t have to look far for proof that backing them works. Charmaine Lebogang Mthimunye came through our own Toolmaking Apprenticeship, extended her training at Ford Motor Company, worked as a CNC Programmer at Silverton Components, and as of three weeks ago, polished automotive plastic injection moulds to a mirror finish at Lanulfi Moulds and People in Vicenza, Italy. In 2024, she was the PtSA TDM Powered National Overall Top Achiever and the Gauteng Top Achiever.
“My technical foundation was built through a Toolmaking Apprenticeship at PtSA and fortified by on-the-job training at Ford,” she says. “I’m passionate about engineering excellence, continuous learning, and contributing to innovation and quality within the manufacturing and automotive industries.”
It’s not just the shop floor, either. Lozien Jarvis started out as an administrative clerk. In 2018, facing possible retrenchment, she decided to start her own company — and got turned down by bank after bank before the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) backed her. Today her company, Equal ELM Trading, manufactures engine protection systems for diesel engines and provides precision CNC engineering services. “PtSA has been an invaluable partner in my entrepreneurial journey,” says Jarvis, now the company’s Director, crediting the networking, market access and quality-benchmarking support that came with it. “Being a woman in the manufacturing and engineering sector has presented its own unique challenges,” she adds, “but it has also strengthened my resolve to lead with integrity, innovation, and excellence.”
Then there’s Bennita Sigawuki, who grew up in Limpopo herding livestock with no idea what toolmaking even was. In October 2021 she applied for the PtSA four-year apprenticeship programme in Gauteng — vigorous, challenging, and, by her own account, full of mistakes. She got through it anyway, picked up a few awards along the way, and today she’s a Junior Toolmaker at Tente Castors South Africa, awaiting her trade test. “A mistake is an unintentional error,” one of her mentors told her, “but how you get back up from them is what will define the type of person you are.” She took that to heart. “I am proud of the woman that I’ve become,” she says. “The tooling and manufacturing world still needs more young and willing people, and I am proud to be one of the people who make up the community of toolmakers in South Africa.”
One of them built a technical career that took her from apprentice to an Italian shop floor. Another built a manufacturing company from an admin desk. A third didn’t even know this trade existed until she walked into it. Different paths, same lesson: when this industry, and any other industry for that matter, intentionally opens a door for women, women walk through it and excel.
And it’s not just anecdote. In the automotive sector — tooling’s main beneficiary — women make up close to a third of the roughly 317,000-strong organised retail and aftermarket workforce, and nearly 40% of new artisan registrations last year. In one targeted apprenticeship cohort, 60% of participants were women. That’s not luck. That’s what happens when an industry treats female talent as a strategy, not a nice-to-have.
Tooling can do the same. As the representative body for the Tool, Die, Mould and Special Machining sector, PtSA runs the skills programmes and apprenticeships that trained Mthimunye and Sigawuki, because our members tell us, year after year, that the shortage of qualified toolmakers is one of the biggest challenges holding their businesses back. Every young woman we’re not recruiting, mentoring, apprenticing or funding into this trade is a skills shortage we’re choosing not to solve. This isn’t charity or a quota exercise — it’s strategy. South African manufacturing is under pressure from global trade shifts and an ageing artisan workforce; we can’t fix a structural shortage while only fishing from half the pond.
So here’s what I’m asking, this Women’s Month, of our training providers, schools, funders and government: open your apprenticeship intakes with real targets for women. Put people like Mthimunye in front of learners at school career days, so toolmaking looks like a choice before it’s ever a job application. Back people like Jarvis with funding and market access, so one bank’s rejection isn’t the end of the story. Give village girls like Sigawuki the patient, on-the-job mentors who turn mistakes into trade tests, not just a foot in the door. And measure it — because what gets measured is what gets budgeted for.
South Africa’s tooling sector helped build the industrial base this country runs on. Where we go next depends on whether we build it with all our talent, or just half of it. The women who stood silent outside the Union Buildings in 1956 weren’t asking for permission to be part of South Africa’s future. Seventy years later, our industry shouldn’t need to ask either. Let’s just get on with it — rock by rock.
Tapiwa Samanga is Group CEO of the Production Technologies Association of South Africa (PtSA).
