Sisi Safety Wear – Saluting The Women Who Shape Our World

Every day there are women who rise early and leave their homes to work in our fields and factories, build on our construction sites, mine our natural resources and contribute to the South African workforce. Every day there are women overcoming challenges specific to them, both at home and in the workplace.

These challenges range from the balancing act of raising a family and having a career to the more consequential threats of gender-based violence in the workplace.  Many of these challenges require longer term cultural changes; however, every step to a more equitable and inclusive workforce is a step in the right direction.   

Every day there are women in our workforce being issued with ill-fitting men’s safety footwear and PPE. This is one of those smaller steps that can be addressed immediately but sends a powerful message of inclusivity to all the players in the industry.

SiSi prides itself on providing a range of locally developed and manufactured safety footwear and workwear designed around the unique shape of a woman’s body.  With ranges developed for a variety of industries and environments, SiSi Safety Wear has the solution to provide safety, quality and comfort to the female workforce.

SiSi’s latest safety footwear release epitomises the commitment of the brand to ensuring women across industries have a female specific offering.  But women’s safety footwear and workwear has often focused on the more generic and wider reaching offerings to ensure the commercial viability.  SiSi broke this mould in 2020 with their introduction of female specific harnesses catering to women who work at heights; and earlier this year SiSi took another step forward in a more specialised segment by launching the Basi – a safety footwear style that incorporates a built-in meta-guard for women working in the underground mining sector.

The meta-guard does exactly what it suggests in the name by protecting the metatarsal bones on the top of the foot from the threat of falling rocks and debris; an everyday threat in certain mining, and other, applications.  There are a number of men’s safety footwear offerings in this sector, but the Basi is the first, and only, locally made female specific solution of this nature.  More importantly, the Basi is not intended to rake in sales by the thousands, but it is answering the call to an industrial sector earmarked to increase their female representivity and inclusivity, and staying true to SiSi’s ethos of providing women in industry with a solution specific to them.

Women’s Day celebrates the impact that women had on the history of our country as they marched to the union buildings in their thousands in August of 1956 to protest against the carrying of pass books.  In a gesture traditionally reserved for the men in this country, women took a step forward to help shape our history, and have continued to do so ever since.

In celebration of Women’s Day, SiSi congratulates the women across the country helping to build our nation in whatever role you play.

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