Pierre De Vos has some tactical criticism for Cosatu:

First, Cosatu pulled a cheap - but ultimately doomed - stunt by launching an ill-advised equality court application to challenge the composition of the Zille’s cabinet. Now Die Burger is reporting that Cosatu is threatening to institute a motion of no confidence in Zille and her cabinet via their ANC allies in the Provincial Legislature. If that does not work, it is threatening to use section 109 or 125 of the Constitution to unseat Zille. [...] These moves will ultimately all be unsuccessful.

On the other hand, he agrees with the substance of Cosatu’s complaints, if not its methods:

One may very well criticise Zille for appointing an all-male cabinet. Personally I think it reflects very poorly on the DA in general and Zille in particular that she claims not to have been able to find one competent women from among the DA members in the Western Cape Legislature to appoint as an MEC. Either Zille does not want other women in her cabinet because she feels threatened by them, or the DA is so male-centric that it did not attract any competent women to stand for election for the Provincial Legislature.

This strikes me as a puzzling argument. I’ll concede that with the benefit of hindsight, Zille’s appointment of an all-male cabinet may not have been politically savvy (although the ANC’s decision to brand Zille a sexist hardly seems like an obvious avenue of attack, even in retrospect). As a point of substantive criticism however, surely this is moot. If one were to devise an objective standard to measure the “gender-bias” of any government, adding up the number of female cabinet members would be perhaps the most shallow and facile method imaginable. A government’s record on gender issues - like its record on anything else - should be judged primarily by what it actually does in office. If Zille passes over a tiny handful of female candidates for MEC positions but does a good job protecting the interests of her roughly 2.3 million female constituents, this would be a net gain for women in the Western Cape, right?