Reader Mayibuye Magwaza thinks I’m letting the DA off the hook too easily in this post:

Sure, you’re complaining about counting heads in parliament as a benchmark for gender equality. However, I think there’s something to it. If the DA has failed to internally develop female leaders to the extent that Zille really couldn’t find anyone decent for the Cabinet, something’s wrong there. Who’s heading up their branches? Was it really just coincidence?

If an all male cabinet puts in pro-women policies, this doesn’t escape the fact that the power brokers are still overwhelmingly male. It’s not an issue of demanding that the DA ‘window dress ‘ - they shouldn’t have to window dress. If they’ve been paying attention to this issue, they should have more worthy, female candidates for high offices.

Note: I haven’t lost sight of the fact that Zille is female. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, though.

There are several possible responses to this. One is that the Western Cape provincial cabinet is only part of the overall picture, and a broader look at the DA reveals that women are, in fact, represented in the highest echelons of the party. Avishkar Govendar takes this approach:

[W]e see that women have been deployed to run the DA’s Western Cape parliamentary caucus, because the caucus leader, chief whip and the premier, among others, are women. We also see that women hold committee chairpersonships in the legislature, and in South Africa a parliamentary committee chairperson is the third most powerful politician after the minister and deputy minister, in this case MEC, of that portfolio. Finally there are large numbers of women in the Western Cape and Western Cape municipal governments, working from the lowest to the highest levels of the public services.

One might also observe that Zille’s predecessor, Lynne Brown, had nine men in her cabinet and apparently met with no complaints at all. Is the increase from nine men under Brown to ten under Zille so very outrageous that it warrants the threat to “make the [province] ungovernable”, the accusation that Zille has appointed a “cabinet of male concubines”, and all the other bromides from various organs of the ANC? Presumably not - which provides ample evidence that the accusation of “sexism” has been cynical and politically-driven, rather than stemming from a principled concern for the number of women in government.

However, this is all somewhat superficial. The really interesting question is, should the gender of the “power brokers” matter at all?

I think the answer to this question depends a lot on how you view the role of government. The DA, as far as I can tell, adheres to a “liberal” view which is essentially utilitarian and instrumental. In this paradigm, government is viewed almost like a giant machine. The machine is given inputs (in the form of elections, lobbying, and taxes) and it generates outputs (in the form of policies, spending and legislation). The implication is that as long as the machine works smoothly, sticks to its original function and spews out the outputs we want, its internal functions are irrelevant to us - and that includes the ethnic and gender composition of cabinet. By contrast, most of Zille’s critics seem to hold a “metaphysical” view of the state, in which the role of government is not simply to generate the correct outputs, but to embody the nation itself in a Hegelian sense. If this is your view, then ensuring a “representative” government becomes very important, since any group is that is not properly represented is effectively denied the right to full civic participation in the state.

My point is that the “liberal” view of government is simply better. We should be glad to live in an individualistic society rather than one in which people are seen as mere components of groups. We should not desire, nor should we deliberately seek, a government that “looks like us”, because the government is not supposed embody us in the way that Louis XIV embodied the nation of France. We should treat the government like an employee, because in a liberal state this is closer to what it actually is. And just as we evaluate employees on the basis of job performance rather than gender identity, the same should be true for government.