First for Women Insurance is back with the next phase of its Her and Now research, and this time it wants to hear from you directly.
The national survey for the First For Women Her and Now: Insights into the Women of South Africa 2026 report is now open.
Her and Now 2026 survey
It takes a few minutes, is completely anonymous, and completing it enters you into a draw to win one of ten R1000 retail vouchers.
What the 2025 report found
The inaugural Her and Now report, published last year under the subtitle The Quiet Revolution, painted a specific and uncomfortable picture of South African women’s lives.
- 67% of respondents said they felt daily pressure to hold everything together.
- Nearly half said they felt completely unseen by major brands and financial institutions.
The data pointed to something the superwoman archetype had been masking: exhaustion dressed up as strength. Women were rejecting resilience and the expectation that resilience should be invisible and endless.
What the Her and Now 2026 survey is looking for
The 2026 edition leans a bit different. Rather than mapping the pressure, it’s looking for the gaps: where products, services, and systems fail to account for the reality of women’s lives, and what that failure actually costs.
It’s also looking for what First for Women calls “glimmers” – those spaces where South African women are already changing the rules on their own terms, through community, financial resourcefulness, and resilience that isn’t performance.
The findings will be used as a direct blueprint to challenge financial institutions, brands, and formal systems to design for women’s actual lives rather than a flattened version of them.
ALSO READ: South Africa’s fintech gender gap: Why women still face barriers
Why it matters that you fill it in
Research like this only holds weight if the sample is broad enough to be representative. A survey that skews toward one demographic, income bracket, or province tells an incomplete story, and incomplete stories produce incomplete solutions.
If you are a South African woman, your experience of navigating the country’s systems, its banks, its insurers, its retailers, its healthcare, is data. This is where it goes.
Take the survey here.
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