Quotas: Changing the Way Things Look
without Changing the Way Things Are
LOUISE VINCENT
This paper argues that while quotas can quite easily be used rapidly to address the
problem of insufficient numbers of women in representative political institutions, effective representation requires us to pay attention to far more than merely the numbers of
women present. This article suggests that, in particular, we need to look at which kinds
of women are made present by quotas, how these women gain office and what they do
once they are there. Using the South African example as a case in point, the paper
suggests that where women become representatives through mechanisms controlled
by party political hierarchies rather than by way of more broad-based political processes reflecting real social change, quotas can act to legitimate and perpetuate
women’s actual absence of power rather than being an effective remedy.
Women continue to be under-represented in the political elites of representative democracies around the world. In response, a strategy which is much in
vogue is that of the use of quotas to redress imbalances. This paper argues
that despite their much-heralded successes, and here the South African
example is a case in point, quotas are a blunt instrument. Quotas are essentially
about numbers. They are concerned with how many people belonging to a
certain category are present but they mean little in the absence of being
able to answer three further questions which are here referred to as: ‘what’
questions (what do these people do once they are present?), ‘which’ questions
(which women exactly are present?) and ‘how’ questions (how do they come
to be present in the first instance?). Using the South African example, the
paper tries to show why these further questions are important, what they
reveal and why the achievements and successes of quotas can sometimes
obscure the answers to these further questions.
Despite the many difficulties faced by women in South Africa, quotas
appear to be very much the key campaign of the moment, as in many other
parts of the world. South Africa’s Gender Advocacy Project and its
Commission on Gender Equality have both identified as their central focus
Louise Vincent is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Rhodes University,
South Africa.
The Journal of Legislative Studies, Vol.10, No.1, Spring 2004, pp.71–96
ISSN 1357-2334 print=1743-9337 online
DOI: 10.1080=1357233042000318882 # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.
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what is known as the Fifty –Fifty campaign, which aims to increase women’s
representation in parliament to 50 per cent. The ruling ANC, for its part,
through Essop Pahad, the minister responsible for gender issues in the
President’s Office, has expressed an interest in ‘opening a debate’ on introducing a legislated quota for women in parliament (the ANC’s current 30 per
cent quota is a voluntary step taken by the party and is not a policy of any of
the other parliamentary parties). Responding to opposition from other parties
in the legislature to the ‘zebra principle’, Pahad has commented: ‘I am quite
convinced that it is in the national interest to move in this direction’.1 In contrast
to the view expressed by Pahad, the present article argues that while the symbolic arguments for quotas which have to do with providing role models and
ensuring greater legitimacy in a polity can be sustained, more substantive
policy outcomes are contingent on the presence of other enabling factors.
QUOTAS
Quotas for women entail that women must constitute a certain number or
percentage of the members of a body, whether it is a candidate list, a parliamentary assembly, a committee, or a government. The quota system
places the burden of recruitment not on the individual woman, but on
those who control the recruitment process. The core idea behind this
system is to recruit women in to political positions and to ensure that
women are not isolated in political life . . . [Q]uota systems aim at ensuring
that women constitute at least a ‘critical minority’ of 30 or 40 per cent.2
There are many different arguments for quotas and numerous ways of categorising these arguments.3 For our purposes, a reasonable overview would be to
say that these arguments are of three possible types: normative, consequentialist and symbolic. The aim of the present study is to do two things
simultaneously: the first is to suggest that there are theoretical difficulties
with sustaining logically any of the arguments for quotas, particularly if one
accepts the critique of essentialism. The paper argues that the one argument
that has some veracity, namely the symbolic argument, is not frequently
invoked as the most important reason for adopting the quota by the advocates
of the latter and has political implications which are much less far-reaching
than would be the case if either of the other two arguments could be sustained.
The second aim of this article is to say that even if the essentialist critique is
overlooked, empirical observation does not yield the evidence that is needed if
the consequentialist claims are to be upheld.
The Normative Argument/The Argument from Justice
The first argument offered by some proponents of a quota for women is normative: fairness and equality require that women be present in decision-making
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structures; gender parity is simply a matter of justice.4 The fact that the make-up
of political elites is distorted in gendered ways points us to the likely existence
of some form of injustice or discrimination in society. This is something upon
which we might all quite easily agree. However, if this is the ailment, the
remedy of changing the composition of representative bodies through direct
political intervention, while politically seductive, appears ill-placed. Such intervention would seem to be an effective way of simply masking more effectively
the injustice which is rendered more transparent by distorted patterns of representation. It is, in other words, window-dressing. If there is an argument to
be made for it then the argument must rest on the assumption that presence
leads to other changes and whether or not it does is then open to empirical investigation. Precisely those features of society which lead to the distortion in the
first place make it impossible for the presence of women, in the absence of
other far-reaching measures, to make much difference at all.
The Consequentialist Arguments
The second set of arguments offered by the advocates of quota systems are
based on the consequences that will follow from having a larger number of
women present, say in a national parliament. This second argument takes
various forms, for example, quotas will mean that more women are in
power and this will result in different policy outcomes to reflect women’s concerns better. Or in another form it is said that women have different interests to
men and these can only be represented in the political process if women are
present. Or women are said to be more likely to vote for other women and
so a quota will have the consequence of greater popularity for a party
among female voters.
The immediate problem with any of these arguments is their underlying
essentialism. To say that a particular woman or even several women are
present is not to say that rural women or lesbian women or illiterate women
are present and there is nothing about women that simply by being women
makes them aware of what it means to be these other kinds of women. It is
genuinely impossible to find any substantive common ground in the way in
which middle-class white South African women and rural African women
experience childbirth, for example. The difficulty, moreover, is not just with
the fact that there are all kinds of women but with the fact that the kinds of
women who tend to be present in political elites are frequently drawn from
a very narrow layer of women. In Africa, the vast majority of women are
not educated beyond primary level, if indeed they are educated at all. Yet
female representatives tend to be educated to tertiary level. Moreover, most
are from quite a small number of elite political families.
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A different kind of consequentialist argument is that women have a different approach to politics so that their presence will lead to positive changes in
the political culture.
It is often suggested, for example, that women will be less competitive,
more co-operative, more prepared to listen to others; that women bring
with them a different, and more generous, scale of values; that women
raise the moral tenor of politics. These arguments are always associated
with women’s role as caring for others, and often more specifically with
their role as mothers.5
In order to escape the obvious essentialism in this sort of account, advocates
frequently invoke a social pattern in which women happen, frequently, to find
themselves in roles of care and this in turn creates in the majority of women a
particular set of dispositions.6 The difficulty with this is that many women
who enter politics are able to do so precisely because either they are not
overburdened with care or their attitude to and experience of the kinds of
caring roles which are supposed uniquely to equip them to make a difference
are not ideal-typical. In South Africa, female professionals typically have
other women performing their care responsibilities rather there being any
widespread challenge of the fact that these are seen as their responsibilities
in the first place. So whereas the ethic of care supposedly emerges from the
experience of being fully responsible over long periods of time for young
children, and from the intimacy and empathy that derives from such relationships, and which purportedly produces in those who perform these roles a
particular approach to politics, female politicians are often precisely those
people who through circumstances or attitude have not had these experiences,
or at least have not had them in quite the way that is suggested by many of the
essentialist and idealised portrayals of how women mother and subsequently
participate in politics.
The Symbolic Arguments
The third argument is symbolic: quotas are a public demonstration of a
society’s commitment to equality, they place women in positions of power
and this makes other women feel that they have role models, that they are
not excluded, that the political process is legitimate. In this view, quotas are
not so much about representing interests as about giving people (in this
case, women) ‘the feeling that they are present on the political scene
through the representatives’ personal characteristics’.7 This too is open to
empirical investigation (do people in fact have this feeling as a result of the
presence of women?) but of a different kind.
Jane Mansbridge makes a stronger argument for the purely symbolic
aspect of descriptive representation, namely its capacity to increase legitimacy
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in contexts of past discrimination: in contexts of ‘low de facto legitimacy,
constitutional designers and individual voters have a reason to institute
policies that promote descriptive representation, even when such implementation involves some losses in the implementation of other valued ideals’.8
This is a powerful argument not least because it is contextual – the point
made is that in certain contexts, namely where there has been a history
of discrimination and exclusion, it is important to shift perceptions both on
the part of members of an excluded group and on the part of the advantaged
groups and having members of the disadvantaged present in representative
structures can help to do this. But applied in the South African context the
argument raises difficult questions. Clearly there is a history of discrimination
against, and exclusion of, women. For the first 40 years of white women’s
enfranchisement in South Africa, only a total of 15 women were elected to
parliament. However, despite this glaring reality, racial discrimination was
always what defined South Africa under apartheid and continues to do so.
For this reason, the ANC as the party of liberation commands enormous
(almost exclusive) legitimacy among the black majority and in the minds of
most of the black electorate what is important is being represented by a
member of the party, and in particular by a black person. Few black
women, particularly poorer women, cite gender as being important in their
voting decision-making. Indeed, the party list electoral system leaves most
voters entirely in the dark about the race, class or gender identity of those
for whom they vote since voters make their mark next to the name and
symbol of a party rather than a list of candidates. Campaigning in this
system is along the lines of party alone, giving scant opportunity for a politics
of identity to play a significant role in electioneering.
In South Africa, a peculiar set of circumstances has led to the national parliament having a greater number of women present than most in the world.
However, this achievement is not mirrored in the social, private or economic
spheres, in local or provincial government, or in political party hierarchies.
Whether or not the presence of women, achieved through the mechanism of
quotas, can make a real difference in society and politics is contingent on a
number of further factors which are here delineated as ‘how, which and
what questions’ – in other words, we need to look at how women come to
be present in greater numbers, which women are present and what they do
once they are present.
THE ‘HOW’ QUESTIONS
In South Africa, the idea of using a quota system to improve the representation
of women in political structures began to be mooted during the 1980s in ANC
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structures (while the movement was in exile) as well as in United Democratic
Front (UDF – the ANC’s then internal legal equivalent) circles as a result of
unhappiness on the part of women in the liberation movement about their
limited presence in leadership positions. Consequently, an agreement in principle was reached in the movement over a 30 per cent quota for women in
ANC structures. When the country began to move towards negotiations for
democratisation from the early 1990s, the issue was again raised by the
ANC’s Women’s League which demanded 30 per cent women’s representation in elected positions within the ANC. However, when the League’s resolution was brought to the ANC’s conference in 1991 it was withdrawn before
being put to the vote. Debate on the matter was heated and the leadership
feared that it would not succeed if taken to the vote. The quota was later
pushed through by the ANC’s National Executive Committee just prior to
the first democratic elections in 1994.
One might think at first glance that this story of the way in which the ruling
party’s electoral quota for women was won is a good example of the benefits
of a powerful centralised party, combined with the added power accorded that
party to determine candidates in a proportional representation, party list, electoral system. However, it reflects also the core weakness of quotas, namely
that they can be introduced in a way that is, firstly, totally controlled by the
party leadership and, secondly, does not reflect anything about changed
attitudes either within the party or in society more broadly.
How the quota comes into being and how it is implemented are crucial
questions which will play a large role in determining the exact dimensions
and shape of the political space that is opened up for women as the result of
quota measures. This point has been alluded to in some of the quota literature
but its implications have not been thoroughly addressed. Drude Dahlerup cites
the Spanish MP Anna Balletbo as follows:
Quotas are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they oblige men
to think about including women in decision-making, since men must
create spaces for women. On the other hand, since it is men who are
opening up these spaces, they will seek out women who they will be
able to manage – women who will more easily accept the hegemony
of men.9
The point is made again a little differently in an editor’s note later in the
chapter:
It is worthwhile noting that some governments, in some Arab countries
for example, actually use the quota system for their own purposes. By
getting more of their especially chosen women on board (the ‘queens’
of the political arena, as the Speaker of the Swedish Parliament referred
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77
to them during an International IDEA conference), governments can
achieve two objectives: get the token ‘controllable’ women, while
claiming they are in favour of promoting women’s participation.10
As Christine Pintat, Inter-Parliamentary Union, Switzerland, puts it, ‘In some
ways, quotas are a remedy to a disease, but in some cases they can lead to
another disease. As we have seen in Central and Eastern European countries,
quotas have led to a ceiling. They have led countries to not develop a political
culture whereby women are integrated into the political system’.11
Yet aside from citing these views Dahlerup does not herself explore or
examine at all, at least in the article cited, what the overall implications of
these empirical observations might be for the strategy of quotas. Dahlerup
lists the pros and cons of quotas,12 but under cons includes only the sort of
argument that would be made in principle against any measure to increase
the number of women (‘quotas are undemocratic’; ‘quotas are against the principle of equal opportunity’) rather than exploring the potentially damaging
effect of quotas from the perspective of those who would wish to advance
women’s rights and representation. Instead, the focus for Dahlerup as for
most other proponents of quotas, is on problems of implementation, namely
recruitment and finding vacant, winnable seats for women who are recruited.
Dahlerup does make the point that a quota system cannot remove the
obstacles of combining job, family and political activity – a significant
issue for women and a bigger problem for women than for men13 – but
without real comment or consideration of the far-reaching implications this
observation has for the efficacy of the strategy of quotas itself. That is to
say, people who do what most women do, namely take primary responsibility
for families, are unlikely to benefit from quotas. So what we then have is that
qualities, traits, roles and experiences associated with the feminine, mothering, and so on, continue to be estranged from public life and the women who
are present are atypical, but more importantly the feminine is not present.
This point is made unintentionally, perhaps, in the quote by Indian MP
Sushma Swaraj: ‘Some men did not want women to come forward, so they
put forward their wives, sisters-in-law and mothers. But talented, educated
women also came forward’.14 The implication here is that wives, mothers
and sisters-in-law are not talented and should not be put forward for office.
This brings us right back to the question of why, normatively, do we want
women to be present in the first place? Because we want people there who
are somehow ‘like us’? But are wives, mothers, daughters-in-law not ‘like us’?
South Africa is an example of a country where the presence of women has
increased dramatically as a result of a quota system adopted by the ruling
party. South Africa has what many commentators have pointed to as the
ideal electoral system and institutional requirements for quotas to be
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effective: ‘A closed-list system, a placement requirement, large district magnitude and good-faith compliance by political parties are the factors that make
quotas work’.15 The quota, along with three other features of the South African
political system, namely the fact that it operates a pure proportional electoral
system (the nationwide party list), its closed list system in which parties
present a rank-ordered list of candidates that cannot be altered by voters,
along with the ruling ANC’s overwhelming (two-thirds) electoral dominance,
has resulted in a large number of women, mainly from the ruling party, being
present in parliament. The closed list system means that it is entirely up to the
party to determine whether women are placed high or low on their electoral lists
(sometimes referred to in the literature as the party’s ‘placement mandate’16)
and thus, based on its estimates of how much electoral support it will garner,
the party is able effectively to determine, how many women are elected. If it
estimates that it will receive 60 per cent of the vote then it knows that only
the women candidates placed in the top 60 per cent of its list will be elected.
If it wishes to have 30 women elected then it will place the names of 30
female candidates in the top 60 per cent of names on its list. The number of
women in South Africa’s national legislature compares very favourably with other
national legislatures around the world. In June 1999, 120 out of South Africa’s
400 MPs were women (30 per cent compared to a world average of 13 per
cent of women in lower houses or parliament).17 South Africa is placed eighth
in the world in terms of percentage of women MPs in national legislatures.18
In all provincial legislatures and in the national parliament, the majority of
women present are from the ruling ANC19 thanks to the party’s policy of a
one-third quota of women on its electoral lists. However, the level of participation on the part of the ANC’s quota of women has not been in proportion to
their numbers. According to the 1996 report to the Speaker, ‘[o]f the few who
do ask questions, the women MPs in the opposition and minority parties have
recorded more questions as individuals than the women MPs in the majority
party’.20 The same report found that women’s participation in vote debates
had declined compared with 1994. It is the latter who select which women
are promoted within party structures, who determine the party’s representatives on committees and who allocate speaking time in the house. The list
system ensures women’s quiescence because allegiance is owed to the political party which placed the woman high on its list rather than to the voter. The
absence of close links between an MP and a specific constituency to which
the MP is responsible means that women cannot claim to have a power base
independent of the male-dominated party hierarchy. In this system, women
gain power only through access to men: ‘Connections are the name of the
game. And men are the game, they control the game’.21 This goes some
way to explaining why South Africa’s female parliamentarians have not, on
the whole, succeeded in conceiving of themselves or acting as a gender interest
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group. Women across party-political lines privately report that women’s issues
are more often than not treated within party caucuses ‘with a degree of patronising
indulgence’.22 Women MPs addressing parliament in South Africa have reported
receiving notes from male colleagues commenting on their appearance. This is
just the tip of an iceberg of an overarching set of structural conditions and
dominant attitudes that make agenda-setting by women highly unlikely.
The ANC’s centrally dominated character has been implicated in the
spectre of parliamentary brain-drain for the ruling party and centralisation is
reinforced by the party list electoral system. In 2002, Pregs Govender, one
of only a handful of women who had proved an outspoken and independent
spokesperson for women and who had chaired the portfolio committee on
the status of women and children, left parliament for academe. Her departure
followed that of Andrew Feinstein, who had quit his post as the ANC’s lead
MP on the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa). Feinstein left
when he clashed with party bosses over the government’s controversial
arms deal. Govender came under pressure for her open support of free
anti-retroviral drugs at the height of the party’s Aids denialist phase.23 The
government’s policy on HIV is a good example of how the manner in which
women enter parliament is important to what they are able to do once there.
Although there is some evidence to suggest that several female ANC MPs are
less than happy with the President’s stance on HIV/Aids, particularly its
foot-dragging behaviour on the provision of drugs to prevent mother-to-child
transmission of HIV, the party list system means that they are beholden to the
party rather than to constituencies (where people are ill and dying in large
numbers) and parliament has, as a result, addressed the issue only half-heartedly.
As one of the few ANC MPs who did try to take up HIV/Aids in a concerted
manner, Pregs Govender battled to garner support from fellow ANC MPs for
her committee’s recommendations on how to mitigate the effects of HIV/Aids
on women and children. Govender resigned from parliament in 2002.24 This
is in contrast to Uganda’s constituency-based system, for example where
MPs are leaders in the fight against Aids. As Dr Alex Coutinho, who heads the
Aids Support Organisation in that country, commented, ‘they know they will
not be re-elected if they don’t do anything’.25
Intimately related, then, with the question of how the quota comes about in
the first place and how women enter parliament, on the basis of which type of
electoral system and democratic process, is the ‘what question’ – the question
of what they are able or willing to do once they arrive there.
THE ‘WHICH’ QUESTION
What is more, those women who gain a public voice are typically
privileged, and this generates debate about the different forms of
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inequality when women politicians, for the most part, are white and
middle class.26
While the ANC’s electoral quota ensures that many women enter parliament,
the list system has proved to be something of a double-edged sword when it
comes to which women enter parliament and their degree of independence,
power and influence once they are there. The party list electoral system
places control over which women enter parliament in the hands of the party
hierarchy. It ensures that ‘all politicians must remain popular with (mostly
male) party bosses to survive’.27 To talk, as Phillips does, of the difference
in interests between women and men, retains the now contested notion of
two genders. Yet many recent commentators28 have argued that it would be
more accurate to talk of many genders and many ways of being gendered. It
is experience, surely, that gives rise to interests and our experiences really
do differ in relation to every example conceivable. We can therefore, at one
level, point out that nine of South Africa’s 27 cabinet members (excluding
the President and the Deputy President) are women, while seven out of 14
deputy ministers are women. But what are we to infer from the fact that
they are ‘women’? Is it not important also to ask who these women are?
The first observation that can be made is that most are in the older age
bracket with only one of the 16 being younger than 40 while five are
between 40 and 50, five are between 50 and 60 and four are older than 60.
Of the 16, only three are non-graduates and of these three, one (Geraldine
Fraser-Moleketi, minister of Public Service and Administration) attended
Harvard on a fellowship and one (Thoko Didiza, minister of Agriculture
and Land Affairs) obtained several diplomas in the fields of journalism,
business and administration. Thoko Didiza is exceptional in another respect
in that she is the only one of the nine female cabinet ministers not to have
spent a large part of her early career and/or academic training outside the
country in exile either in a neighbouring country or further afield, returning
to South Africa only at the time of democratic change. Although it must be
pointed out that the minister of Public Works, Stella Sigcau, was a career politician in the Transkei whose independence from South Africa was nominal. In
stark contrast, all the female deputy ministers cut their teeth in the fraught
environment of opposition politics inside the country under apartheid. All
are black and the vast majority either are married or have been married and
are now widowed or divorced. The vast majority are middle-class, having
enjoyed careers in teaching, the medical profession, academia, the law,
business, NGO management and so on.
At the level of cabinet, then, the women who are present are, as might be
expected, drawn from a very narrow strata of society, which calls into question
the degree to which they can be seen as any more representative of, or attuned
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to, the needs, concerns and interests of the majority of ordinary women. On the
other hand, rank-and-file female MPs who are drawn from a wider crosssection of society face great difficulties, precisely because of their backgrounds, in making their presence count. Many of these women report
feeling fearful, overwhelmed and pained by their experience of entering parliament.29 Men and women alike whose past life experience did not prepare
them for parliament were, according to the ANC’s chief whip, disoriented
and traumatised in their new role as parliamentarians.30 But for women
there were the added typical disadvantages of trying to combine family
responsibilities with parliamentary careers along with the fact that women
experienced parliament as a highly chauvinistic environment.
To some extent, experience does seem to suggest that in the years subsequent to 1994 the mere presence of women in parliament has led to some
changes to its culture and structure, from the introduction of more familyfriendly working hours and a crèche, to the fact that male politicians are
reportedly less offensive in their dealings with women MPs which seems
partly attributable simply to being more accustomed to their presence.
However, this does not in itself surely constitute an argument for the quota.
For proponents of the quota, the point of the quota is not to change parliament
but to change what parliament does and in particular what the women present
in parliament do. In this regard the evidence is less reassuring. A 1996 report
concluded that women’s participation in parliament was on the decline. This
and subsequent reports have cited women’s lack of professional skills and
administrative back-up as key to their inability to make enough of an
impression in parliament. However, women MPs themselves consistently
point to the domestic as the key to understanding the difficulty that they have:
Women MPs commonly identify the rigours of combining parliamentary work with family responsibilities as a major problem. Many find
the lack of contact with their children unacceptable even if the children
are looked after by their father. Families are often divided between Cape
Town and the home residence, more of a problem for women for whom
it is harder to encourage husbands with jobs and careers to move. Husbands often cannot cope with their wives’ unspecified working hours,
developing jealous suspicions with which women in turn find it hard
to deal. Other husbands are unable to cope with their wives’ elevated
public status.31
What this points to again is the key problem with quotas – they are a strategy
to change the way things look without changing the way things are.
Moreover, as has been pointed out, simply reciting the race and gender
characteristics of a political representative does not tell us what that
person’s policy stances will be. As Gisela Geisler32 writes in a recent
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article, Helen Suzman, a white woman who was the only female member of
the opposition in South Africa’s Parliament between 1953 and 1974, took it
upon herself to ‘represent’ partially her constituency (since the electoral
system was constituency-based at that time) but also and, for Suzman more
importantly, the interests and concerns of black people who, because of apartheid legislation, could not be present in parliament. Taking this point further,
we can note that, as it happens, Suzman did not see herself particularly as a
‘representative’ of women, despite having made her maiden speech on the
subject of the absence of women’s rights. She did take some interest in
issues that might be described as ‘women’s concerns’ but her interests were
wide ranging and her particular focus was on racial discrimination. Moreover,
it was Suzman’s impression that from the point of view of most of her constituents, the fact that she was a woman was of little importance: ‘no,
I think that they thought that I was a competent and conscientious MP
which I really was . . . I was usually working for non-constituents but that
was why I was elected. My constituents mainly felt I should play this
role’.33 On this basis, that is, speaking on behalf of black South Africans,
Suzman, a white middle class Jewish woman, won nine elections in her
well-heeled all-white constituency, each with a larger majority than the last.
While one of the key arguments for quotas, as we saw earlier, was the idea
that they would somehow ‘make up’ for the imbalances created by the social
division of labour,34 it is difficult to see how they achieve this. Instead, in the
absence of doing something about the inequalities in the social division of
labour, what quotas do is put a certain kind of woman into power. This invalidates the background theoretical assumptions of quotas in the first place –
we need women there because women have something in common with one
another and are different to men. The point is that the women who land up
there on the basis of quotas have little in common with most other women
because, quotas or no quotas, the persistence of an unequal division of
labour means that most women cannot avail themselves of the opportunities
provided by quotas even if they can achieve the education and so on that is
necessary for them to do so.
Many commentators on identity politics have been willing to recognise the
difficulty of using ‘race’ as a marker for representation but have been far more
hesitant to do so when it comes to gender, the latter being seen by most as a
simple matter of women’s interests versus men’s interests while one seldom
hears talk of ‘black’ interests and ‘white’ interests, for instance. For
example, in her commentary on race, while Anne Phillips recognises the difficulty of a simplistic dualism and that this means race is not easily amenable
to a politics of quotas – ‘Distinguishing only between whites and the rest
produces a crude and misleading distinction’35 – she recognises no such
complexity in relation to gender. Gender, for Phillips, is ‘a much simpler
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category’.36 It is difficult to understand why precisely the point which Phillips
makes in relation to racial or ethnic identity is not deemed to hold true also for
the reduction of gender identity to a simple binary:
Race or ethnicity can then become a symbolic shorthand which obscures
other areas of difference and erases other aspects of political choice. In
the absence of a clearly defined and shared group interest which any
member would automatically promote, changing the character of the
representatives may then change nothing else.37
THE ‘WHAT’ QUESTION
The assumption underlying all arguments for quotas, as Judith Squires points
out,38 is that it matters somehow that there are only a few women or fewer
women than men present in, say, a national parliament. Proponents of
quotas offer a variety of reasons for why it should matter, often citing these
arguments interchangeably or as if they are self-evident. Two of them, the
symbolic argument and the argument from justice, do not rely on any assumptions about what women actually do once they enter politics. But the consequentialist arguments do of course rely on assumptions about what women
will do once they enter politics. Simply put, the consequentialist justification
for the quota suggests that the presence of women will change the content of
politics. Yet, as Judith Squires points out in her study of British politics, ‘the
research has yet to prove conclusively that the presence of women does make
in itself a significant difference’.39
Most normative theorists of democracy as well as empirical political
scientists have summarily dismissed the idea of descriptive representation –
the notion that our representatives, in order properly to represent us, must
somehow be like us either in physical identity, or experience. Iris Marion
Young sums up the key point: to say that a representative is in some sense
like a constituent tells us nothing about what that representative will do in
politics.40 Alexandra Dobrowolsky points to the Canadian case to illustrate
that women’s presence in parliament may increase but that this can occur in
a government that ignores or is hostile to women’s issues such as with the
Mulroney government of the 1980s and early 1990s.41 Even if we are able
to find support for the idea that female legislators have different policy preferences than their male counterparts, this says little about whether or not
they are, given the institutional and social environment, to translate these
preferences into action.
In her classic study of representation,42 Hannah Pitkin argues that we need
to look not only at who our representatives are but also at what they do. Rather
than making assumptions abut how people will behave purely on the basis of
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who they are, we need an account of what good representation substantively is.
As most would acknowledge, our representatives are not mere functionaries
carrying out exact mandates. Representatives are involved in active
decision-making and this is precisely the reason why those concerned with
presence care about who these representatives are – as a kind of limited guarantee against injustice. However, there is simply no evidence to support
the idea that just decision-making is the inevitable or even likely outcome
of changing the composition of the legislature. Much of the evidence in fact
points in the opposite direction. In Africa, as is widely lamented, the
changed racial or ethnic composition of legislatures has not always led to
legislation that benefits the electoral majority. Very often, simply having
members of marginalised groups present when unjust decisions are taken
serves to legitimise these decisions because legitimacy is thought to rest
not on what is decided, but on who was present when it was decided.
A member of a marginalised group (or even two or three members) might
speak in a debate, but what really matters is not the act of speaking itself
but how it is received, what influence it has, how it is understood and interpreted, what sorts of words, voices, ways of expressing and views themselves
are regarded as irrelevant to the ‘real’ business of politics. If certain ways
of being, speaking and behaving are regarded as less legitimate than others,
then good representation is not present, even if the assembly resembles a
miniature portrait of the nation.
We need, then, an account of good representation and it is this that is
largely absent from a pure politics of presence. The good representative
consciously tries to take decisions in a way that is cognisant of the many perspectives and roles in which s/he is immersed. Good representation implies a
reconciling of interests, a process in which some interests will sometimes
predominate but not always; a process in which there will be a conscious
seeking out of the marginalised as a duty of all representatives, as part of
what the very meaning of representation is thought to be. The alternative
would be to see the voicing of the marginalised view as the responsibility
of only the ‘representative(s)’ of the marginalised.
Proponents of quotas for women have high hopes that women, once they
are present in legislatures, will be vociferous advocates for the interests and
concerns of other women who have hitherto been voiceless. Yet a wide
body of research shows that women’s participation in political organisations
and processes has a conditional character.43 It is accepted as long as they
do not express themselves in gendered terms or act to protect gender-based
interests. Women in South Africa’s first democratic parliament have remarked
on the way in which many were afraid to be identified with gender activism, in
a context where female politicians with a feminist orientation were ‘sometimes referred to by men, to much laughter in party caucuses, as “that lot
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who went to Beijing” ’.44 Women were also reportedly wary of ‘going on
about’ women’s issues lest party leadership should become ‘irritated’. Far
from being vociferous in their protection of women’s interests, ‘survival
instincts triumph. Women back off’.45 The overall impression of the majority
of South Africa’s female MPs’ participation in parliament is an unwillingness
to be overtly identified with the promotion of women’s issues thanks to the
perception that this would result in exclusion from the mainstream of politics
where power and influence is located. Paradoxically, then, women can have
access to power as long as they do not indicate a preference for using it to
promote women’s interests in an adversarial manner.
Many will argue that South African women have made great strides since
1994. A national machinery for gender equality has been created, including
the Commission on Gender Equality (CGE –an independent statutory body
established in April 1997 as one of six state institutions tasked with supporting
democracy), the Office on the Status of Women (established early in 1997)
and, in parliament, the women’s caucus, the Parliamentary Women’s Group
and the Women’s Empowerment Unit the Committee on Improving the
Quality of Life and Status of Woman was established in August 1996 and,
together with NGOs, created the Women’s Budget initiative, which looks at
the impact of the national budget on women and on poor women in particular.
The Bill of Rights in the new Constitution outlaws discrimination on several
grounds, including gender, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation and marital
status. New laws passed since 1994 include the Choice on Termination of
Pregnancy Act of 1996 which allows women to have abortions; the Public
Service Act of 1994 removes discriminatory practices such as differential
pension and housing benefits for married and unmarried women and men;
the 1996 White Paper on the Transformation of the Public Service legislates
for transformation units to be included in all national and provincial departments to ensure that members of disadvantaged groups, including women,
are sufficiently represented at all levels; the Labour Relations Act of 1995
protects workers against unfair discrimination on the basis of sex, race or
other grounds; the Employment Equity Bill requires employers to report
regularly to government concerning race, gender and disability equity in
their organisations; the Maintenance Act requires mothers and fathers to
pay fairly towards the raising of their children.
Yet closer investigation reveals a less encouraging picture. In the Commission on Gender Equality’s first annual report, its first chairperson, Thenjiwe
Mtintso, wrote that the report was presented ‘with a sense of sadness, that
we were denied a better chance to do more’.46 Although charged with monitoring and evaluating government and the private sector, public education and
information, making recommendations about laws, policies and programmes,
resolving disputes and investigating inequality and commissioning research,
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the commission consists of only 11 commissioners, of whom half are
part-time. It operates on a tiny budget (according to Commissioner Sheila
Meintjes, it is under-funded by R5 million a year) and despite its supposed independence from government, commissioners are appointed by the President.
Financial statements from the 2001/02 financial year show that 57 per cent of
the commission’s budget was spent on remuneration while only 27.5 per cent
went to programmes.47
The Office on the Status of Women (OSW) is charged with developing
a national gender policy, promoting affirmative action in government,
supporting government bodies to integrate a gender perspective in all policies
and programmes, organising and coordinating gender training and projects
for government departments. However, like the CGE, the OSW has limited
real power. It is not automatically involved in the drafting of national
policy. Its staff consists of one director and a secretary. At the national
level its funds are limited and at the provincial level many provinces have
not allocated any budget at all for the OSWs, relying instead on donor
funding. South Africa does not have a separate ministry for women’s affairs
as many countries do. Instead, the hope is that gender units within government
departments will ensure that each department incorporates a gendered
perspective into its policies and programmes. However, in practice, departments have taken gender into account in their internal practices but have
not translated this into a gendered perspective in policy-making and
implementation.
The presence of women in parliament has brought about some changes –
working hours have been altered to take into account the domestic responsibilities of parliamentarians, a crèche has been introduced, there are more
bathroom facilities for women (these had to be specially built with the
sudden influx of women!) and the language used in debate and legislation
must now be non-sexist. However, many women still report finding the
culture of parliament alienating and find the pressure of family responsibilities
debilitating to their parliamentary work.
Despite their numbers in parliament, women have not been able to make
any difference to the macroeconomic policy direction initiated by the ANC
government introduced in 1996 and entitled Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). Replacing the earlier Keynesian direction of the ANC’s
policy rhetoric, GEAR took a sharp turn in the direction of neo-liberalism,
stressing export-led growth, reducing the budget deficit, keeping a tight rein
on inflation and government spending and attracting foreign investment.
This has had far-reaching implications for the possibilities of programmes
to redress gender inequality – an experience that is mirrored in many other
contexts. Dobrowolsky, for example, commenting on the Canadian case,
points out that
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the neo-liberal state operates as if equality exists, despite a socioeconomic context in which the gap between the rich and the poor is
widening . . . As a result, at a time in Canadian history when there are
more women than ever in prominent political positions, inequalities
are growing rather than subsiding, and thus huge shortfalls in the aggregation and articulation of various women’s interests and identities
remain.48
Controls on government expenditure mean less is available to spend on social
services; cuts in public service expenditure have primarily affected women
who are clustered in the teaching and nursing professions; where
government pulls back on services, for example to children and the elderly,
it is women who must fill the gaps; trade liberalisation has meant job losses
for women in industries such as textiles and clothing; growing unemployment
and the absence of a job creation strategy are implicated in rising levels of
crime, with women and children among the particularly vulnerable.
Similarly, women have not been instrumental in shifting government
policy on HIV despite the stark and obvious effects of the disease on the
country’s female population. Government estimates for the number of HIVpositive people in South Africa, based on annual surveys of women attending
antenatal clinics, rose to 4.7 million in 2000 from 4.2 million in 1999. The
implication of such figures, according to the Development Bank, is that the
country’s population will start contracting in 2016, when the number of
Aids-related deaths will exceed births. The Medical Research Council
reported in October 2001 that one in four deaths was attributable to Aids,
with nearly 200,000 expected to die as a consequence of Aids in 2001. Life
expectancy at birth, the MRC forecasted, would drop from 54 years in 2001
to 41 in 2010.49 President Thabo Mbeki has become associated with an apparent embracing of dissident doctrine on Aids aetiology. This has meant that
programmes to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus, to distribute
anti-retrovirals to rape victims and other sufferers, and other programmes
aimed at substantially tackling the disease have been stalled. In this, two
successive female ministers of Health have been at the forefront of defending
what many regard as a highly lamentable policy which will be directly responsible for the loss of many lives that might otherwise have been saved, making
the point very starkly that there is no necessary link between the gender of a
government minister and the policy preferences of that person.
The government’s stalled Nevirapine programme is a particularly
important example of the lack of real power that women have in South
Africa. Nevirapine is administered to HIV-positive expectant mothers.
Trials in Thailand suggest that it can cut mother-to-child-transmission of
HIV by half. Yet despite departmental support for its use, the roll-out of the
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programme in the country’s nine provinces has been delayed thanks, it would
appear, to a fear of crossing the President, who apparently regards the drug as
a dangerous toxin. Reports suggest that the minister of Health, Manto
Tshabalala Msimang has the support of her entire department for the
Nevirapine programme but has been reluctant to embark on it without
cabinet approval. This context helps to explain why, when asked to cite
some of its achievements, the chairperson of the Improvement of the
Quality of Life and Status of Women Committee, Lulu Xingwana, had to
resort to mentioning an amendment to the Boxing Act which will mean that
women can participate in the sport.50
It is difficult to see what any of the female ministers have done to infuse a
gender perspective or a particular focus on women into the way in which they
deal with their portfolios. The one exception is the former minister of
Housing, Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele who was in the position for seven
years until 2002 and who made serious attempts to advance the role of
women in construction with the launch of the Women for Housing Association
in 2002, which saw a substantial section of the housing budget (R16.4 million)
being allocated to women contractors. Indeed, many face the battle of trying to
erase their gender identity (which is constantly harped on by the media) so that
they might be taken seriously in their portfolios. Minister of Foreign Affairs
Zuma is frequently described as ‘frumpy’ or badly dressed and as a ‘battle
axe’.51 Minister of Agriculture, Thoko Didiza, has been described as
lacking inner steel. ‘Does she have the thigh muscles to ride the political
storm?’ asked one newspaper in relation to the limitation of the power of
traditional leaders on land administration boards.52
Where female ministers have had the opportunity to fight for policies that
might be regarded (by those who wish to retain the notion of women’s interests) as being particularly in the interests of women, they have not done so,
preferring instead to succumb to the dominant party line emerging in particular from the Office of the President. The minister of Health’s role in the failure
to provide anti-retrovirals to HIV-positive expectant mothers is the most striking case, but there have been others as well. Undoubtedly one of the largest
challenges faced by minister of Public Service and Administration, Geraldine
Fraser-Moleketi, in her attempts to restructure the civil service is that of HIV/
Aids. An internal department report indicates that some 250,000 public
servants, many skilled, may die in the next decade. Yet Fraser-Moleketi’s
department refused to publish the report.
One might ask how it is that a minister of Foreign Affairs or Intelligence
(South Africa has women in both positions) is meant to infuse a gendered or
indeed ‘women’s’ perspective into their approach to their portfolio but this
then only begs the question: why a quota for women in the first place, why
is it regarded as good for women that South Africa has nine women out
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27 cabinet ministers? The only possible answer can be in the form of the
symbolic importance of having women in these positions – the fact that
just having them there makes a point about women’s ability to take on leadership roles, to be capable in public, to be fit to govern. This was the argument
used by former ANC Deputy Secretary General Thenjiwe Mtintso: ‘The mere
politics of women’s presence is important. You need to be able to show at the
most simple level that women can be leaders’.53 But this symbolic role is not
noteworthy by most advocates of quotas. Philips, for example, dismisses it out
of hand, moving on to what she regards as more important arguments that have
to do with the representation of interests.
Most importantly, perhaps, it is impossible to make sound generalisations
about what women think based on their gender alone. This is demonstrated
most strikingly by the events in parliament surrounding the 1996 Choice of
Termination of Pregnancy Bill, commonly heralded as one of the most important achievements of women and for women in the new democratic era. Yet the
evidence suggests that many ANC women in parliament did not support
the bill. The party did not allow a vote of conscience on the matter and one
ANC MP, Jennifer Ferguson, who abstained, faced the wrath of the party
and of its women’s rights activists for doing so. Fellow MP Pregs Govender,
for example, argued that Ferguson was remiss in voting according to her own
view because she had been voted into parliament on the assumption that she
would defend the rights of women to choice over abortion. Other female
MPs whose culture, tradition or religion left them with personal misgivings
about the bill were told by Baleka Kgositsile, Deputy Speaker of Parliament,
that in a party list system MPs have no choice but to take the party line, having
been voted into parliament not as individuals but as members of their party.54
In a particularly stark example, one ANC MP, Sister Ncube, a nun, voted for
the bill against the dictates of her church and presumably of her own conscience. Were MPs being asked to protect rights of women here and were
female MPs charged with a particular responsibility in this regard? Or were
they simply voting for party policy? Indeed, whether or not the majority of
ordinary South African women are in support of abortion has not been
canvassed properly and, given the passionate arguments on both sides of the
abortion debate, along with very high levels of religiosity among South
African women, it is at least plausible that some would argue that abortion
is not in women’s interests, least of all in the form in which the policy is
currently being carried out in South Africa where serial abortions are
common but counselling prior to and post-abortion is limited or, most often,
entirely absent. Many health professionals argue that the legislation in its
current form has done little more than place yet another painful burden on
women’s shoulders, with male partners seeing abortion as a simple contraceptive device which alleviates their responsibility for their actions.
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This example is instructive in revealing the heart of the difficulty with
quotas for women – what does a policy of quotas say about representation;
which constituency are female MPs supposed to represent, their party constituency or women and if the latter in any sense at all, what about the problem of
absence of mechanisms of accountability to this constituency? How, in short,
do we know what women want, which women want which things, which
things are in which women’s interests, and how do we reconcile the differences that inevitably exist? We simply cannot. In this case, the ANC’s
policy was in favour of abortion on demand and it was this, rather than the
views of individual women MPs or the presence in parliament of a relatively
large number of women, that was decisive in carrying the policy into legislation. To herald the country’s new abortion legislation as a triumph for
women and an outcome of the quota policy as many quota proponents do,
then, is disingenuous, if not mischievous. As Peemans-Poullet points out:
History shows us that women’s interests are divided at least in the short
term, that feminist organisations are also divided, that women politicians, even when they are feminists, can all of a sudden support unexpected positions, that in any case, they are not the representatives of
women (who, moreover, do not form a homogenous whole) and do
not rely on women’s organisations (which, moreover, do not have
similar positions).55
In other contexts, some commentators have presented arguments which
they see as suggesting evidence for the consequentialist position – that is,
that having more women present has social policy consequences. Yet closer
examination reveals that the evidence is less than convincing. In Htun and
Jones’ study of quotas for women in Argentina, for example, the positive consequences they list are, firstly, quotas seem to have led to the adoption of more
quotas at other governmental levels (provincial and municipal); secondly, that
women tend to be over-represented on committees that related to women’s
rights or issues of traditional interest to women such as children, families, education, the environment, health and housing; and, thirdly, that women MPs
were more likely to introduce bills in the areas of women’s rights and children
and families.56 The first point, that quotas beget more quotas, can only be seen
as a positive consequence if the argument for quotas can be made in the first
instance. In other words it simply begs the question rather than answering it.
The second can be read as implying that women are relegated to these ‘traditional’ areas and tells us little about what they are actually able to achieve
in these committees and to what extent their presence there makes a difference. The third is at best mixed evidence by the authors’ own admission:
‘The data show that 33 per cent of the women legislators presented a third
or more of their bills in the Women’s Rights area and 11 per cent in the
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Children and Families area. On the other hand, 58 per cent of the women
legislators presented no bills in Women’s Rights and 61 presented no bills
in Children and Families’.57 Yet they conclude that quotas, by getting more
women into Congress, have helped to place gender-related issues on the legislative agenda.58 It is difficult to see how their conclusion can be sustained by
the evidence presented. Rather, on this evidence, the Argentine case seems to
support evidence from South Africa which suggests that a few women take a
particular interest in issues that might be termed ‘women’s concerns’ but that
the majority do not, that women risk being ghettoised in parliamentary committees associated with traditional women’s concerns and that their real power
to influence the overall agenda of social policy is as difficult to measure as it is
to discern. What seems to be the case is that really powerful women are precisely those women who leave behind them their identity as women and any
thoughts of representing womanly concerns, and enter the fray in as degendered a form as possible. Htun and Jones, for example, cite one Argentine
congresswoman remarking: ‘Women, in order to be important politically,
can’t talk about gender issues’.59 Similarly, a Mexican study showed that
gender-related policy changes came about only when they coincided with
party interests.60 This makes it very difficult to determine the actual impact
of the presence of women as opposed to the enactment of policies
that would have been put in place anyway. As Htun and Jones conclude, it
seems to be broad-based alliances of women, not quotas, that are what it
takes to produce legislative action benefiting all women.61
The real question to ask is whether we can attribute the passing of different
(‘women-friendly’) legislation to the presence of a larger number of women.
In this regard the evidence is very mixed. Htun and Jones find, for example,
that ‘Argentine women, in spite of the fact that they make up 28 per cent of
the Congress, have not achieved many more policy changes than women legislators in other countries where the numbers are smaller’.62 Moreover, ‘the vast
majority of women who enter politics in Latin America do not campaign on
women’s issues (such as domestic violence, child care, equal opportunities
or reproductive health), nor do they make such issues the central focus of
their legislative careers’.63 If this is the case, the argument from consequences
must fail, leaving only the symbolic argument for quotas intact. Yet in Htun
and Jones, as in most other quota literature, the symbolic argument receives
scant attention and is regarded as secondary to the key (consequentialist)
arguments for quotas.
CONCLUSION
Quotas have, in many parts of the world (notably Scandinavia) come about as
a result of sustained pressure on the part of women’s groups within parties as
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well as the women’s movement in general. Proponents of quotas for women
conclude that successful quota systems lead to active recruitment of women
by political parties, a critical mass of women, rather than a token few ‘who
will be able to influence political norms and culture’ and give women the
possibility of influencing ‘the decision-making process as individuals or
with specific women’s or feminist points of view’.64 Where difficulties are
acknowledged, these are usually seen as relating chiefly to problems of
implementation. Opponents of quotas are envisaged as mobilising ‘arguments
to maintain the status quo’.65 But by placing the burden of responsibility on
those who control the recruitment process, quotas do several things: they
allow for the most part for only a certain type of woman to enter the political
process; and they give power and control over that woman to the recruiter, and
therefore contribute to a situation in which those who are present as a result of
quotas are not willing or able to do what the proponents of quotas hope they
will do. While some proponents of quotas appear to be aware of these points
and occasionally allude to them, they seem to have little impact on their
overall arguments.
The improved presence of women in South Africa’s national legislature
due to the ANC’s quota has done little more than advance the careers of a
select group of already well-educated, politically highly well-connected
women. In some cases this has been marked by a self-serving arrogance in
which women lay claim to the mantle of legitimacy conferred by the mere
fact of womanhood without having to take particularly seriously the need to
act in ways that are empathetic or sensitive to the needs of the majority of
women, let alone be ‘accountable’ to the latter. The focus on presence,
then, is good for those women who are actually present, but not so good for
those who wish to make their voices heard from outside and who do not
find themselves ‘mirrored’ in any but the most insignificant way by the
women they see in parliament.
Networks of power, role models and mentors who are prepared to guide
newcomers are among the most important resources that tend to be differentially available to men and women. Those with first-hand experience of parliament report that women MPs rarely personally mentor other women in
parliament. This problem appears to be a secondary effect of the overall
lack of value attached to ‘women’s issues’ and the political culture of the
country. Drude Dahlerup, for example, in her studies of women MPs in Scandinavia, found that women politicians worked to recruit other women.66
While Dahlerup imputed the shift in perceptions of women politicians to
the growth in the numbers of women in Scandinavian political life, this has
so far not been borne out by the South African experience where, despite
high numbers, participation specifically in defence of women’s interests is
muted or absent. A dimension of South African women MPs’ vulnerability
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in the post-1994 period (which is no doubt less acute in the Scandinavian case)
is the fact that many are major breadwinners for their families and in a
party political context where defence of ‘women’s interests’ is regarded as
politically illegitimate, divisive or irrelevant, gender activism is seen as a
high-risk activity.
An aspect of this political culture in which the expression of women’s
issues is regarded as irrelevant or divisive or of secondary importance to
‘national priorities’ is what may be termed the ‘constructive criticism’ injunction. Many women have bought into the notion of ‘constructive criticism’ and
‘loyalty’, which has become the dominant party’s line on the form which
opposition to its policies should properly take. In their 1998 needs assessment
of women MPs and MPLs, Bardill and Marks found that party loyalty could
prevent women from speaking up when they would be seen as disagreeing
with male members of their party.67 This appears to be an approach which particularly characterises the participation of black women. According to one
first-hand account, there remain some things that black women just ‘cannot
do, say or support’. While black women offer support in private for an
agenda which aggressively pursues women’s interests, ‘when the going gets
tough, the black women get going. They remain silent. Sometimes, rejecting
the very issues they privately supported . . . The white, Indian and coloured
women are left exposed, as if it is they alone who are pursuing the agenda’.68
The South African example is potentially instructive in a number of ways.
In the first instance, I hope to have shown that we do need to be attentive not
only to presence but also to the (potential non-) consequences of presence.
Secondly, it shows that where improved presence is the result not of
broader societal shifts, but of artificial manipulation of the political process,
its impact is limited. Where presence is embedded in highly oppressive structures including cultural norms where the dominant view offers little scope for
women to have real influence, then it may serve to legitimise injustice more
than to undermine it. The obvious rejoinder may be that it is precisely presence
that is required to reverse these oppressive structures in the long term. This is
open to empirical investigation but it seems doubtful given that in many
countries the pattern is one of declining rather than increasing presence.
There seems to be no clear linear movement in the direction of progress.
Thirdly, representation in Africa is perhaps the best empirical argument
there is against essentialism in what we regard as fulfilling the requirements
of presence. In Africa, where women are present in political elites they tend
to be drawn from a tiny elite (educated) sub-section of the population of a continent where girl children continue to have very little access to secondary,
let alone tertiary, education. Moreover, the pattern is overwhelmingly one
of the women who gain access to power being related by marriage or birth
to powerful men. Fourthly, in South Africa, as elsewhere in Africa, research
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has shown that women MPs have often failed to place women’s issues (using
the broadest possible definition of what these might be) on national agendas.69
Where political presence does appear to have an impact, this is more an
indication of what has already happened outside parliament than a result of
presence itself. As Phillips notes, the result of the introduction of quotas for
women by all sorts of different political parties across the globe has not had
striking results outside the Nordic countries.70 My point is that it is unlikely
to because the political focus on presence has become an easy campaign to
run and to win precisely because it can be accommodated within the present
structure of politics without challenging anything very much at all and its
results are negligible so no one minds too much giving in to the demand.
Where increased presence is achieved in isolation from other substantive
changes, it can give rise to complacency, place the burden of responsibility
for change on women and shift the emphasis away from the radical challenge
to existing social, institutional and cultural norms that really is required.
The same can be said of the approval that quota advocates have shown for
party list proportional representation and other systems that appear to make it
easier for more women to be elected. The reason why they do is because they
do not rely on shifting the prejudices or social conditions that make it difficult
for women to be elected in the first place. In a party list system combined with
a quota, all a party has to do is to find sufficient women willing to stand and fill
its quota. It does not have to rely on these women being electable because in a
party list system people vote for the party label and not for the individuals who
make up the list. What fans of the system fail to recognise is its severe limitations, from the point of view of autonomy from party discipline and the risktaking potential of individual women MPs. Quotas and the party list system
are a way of putting women in parliament without having to change the
social attitudes and structures which make it quite impossible for the vast
majority of women to consider themselves eligible or be considered eligible
for such a role. They are a way of putting women in parliament but retaining
tight control over the form and content of their participation.
NOTES
1. ‘Push for Zebra Principle in Parliament’, Mail and Guardian, 8 Aug. 2003.
2. D. Dahlerup, ‘Using Quotas to Increase Women’s Political Representation’, in A. Karam
(ed.), Women in Parliament Beyond Numbers (Stockholm: IDEA, 1998), p.92.
3. See, for example, Decauquier, 1994 , cited in B. Marques-Pereira, ‘Political Representation in
Belgium’ (Aalborg University, 2000 – www.humsamf.auc.dk/gep/), p.26; J. Squires, ‘Quotas
for Women: Fair Representation?’ in J. Lovenduski and P. Norris (eds.), Women and Politics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.76; M. Htun and B. Jones, ‘Engendering the Right
to Participate in Decision-Making’, in N. Craske and M. Molyneux (eds.), Gender and the
Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p.35.
4. A. Phillips, The Politics of Presence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p.62.
QUOTAS
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
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16.
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18.
19.
20.
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24.
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35.
36.
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38.
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40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
95
Phillips, Politics of Presence.
See, for example, S. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995).
Marques-Pereira, ‘Political Representation in Belgium’, p.24.
J. Mansbridge, ‘Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A
Contingent “Yes” ’, Journal of Politics, 61/3 (August 1999), pp.628–57, at pp.628–29.
Dahlerup, ‘Using Quotas to Increase Women’s Political Representation’, p.95.
Dahlerup, ‘Using Quotas to Increase Women’s Political Representation’, p.99.
Cited in Dahlerup, ‘Using Quotas to Increase Women’s Political Representation’, p.101.
Dahlerup, ‘Using Quotas to Increase Women’s Political Representation’, p.94.
Dahlerup, ‘Using Quotas to Increase Women’s Political Representation’, p.102.
Cited in Dahlerup, ‘Using Quotas to Increase Women’s Political Representation’, p.103.
Htun and Jones, ‘Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-Making’, p.36.
Htun and Jones, ‘Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-Making’, p.40.
D. Budlender, T. Samuels, T. Pigou and N. Valji, Participation of Women in the Legislative
Process (Cape Town: European Union Parliamentary Support Programme, 1999), p.32.
B. Jones and J. Ballington, National and Provincial Election Results (Auckland Park:
Electoral Institute of South Africa, 1999), p.46.
K. McKenzie (ed.), PIMS 2000 Guide to Politics in the Provinces (Cape Town: Idasa, 2000),
p.30.
Cited in C. Lowe-Morna, ‘Overview’, in Commission on Gender Equality et al. (eds)
Redefining Politics. South African Women and Democracy (Johannesburg: Commission on
Gender Equality, 1999), p.23.
Lowe-Morna, ‘Overview’, p.109.
Lowe-Morna, ‘Overview’, p.109.
‘ANC’s Brightest Heading Out’, Mail and Guardian, 30 April 2003.
‘We are Still an Ostrich Nation’, Mail and Guardian, 24 April 2003.
‘We are Still an Ostrich Nation’, Mail and Guardian, 24 April 2003.
A. Dobrowolsky, ‘Intersecting Identities and Inclusive Institutions’, Journal of Canadian
Studies, 35/4 (2001), p.241.
S. Vos, ‘Women in Parliament: A Personal Perspective’, in Commission on Gender Equality
et al., Redefining Politics. South African Women and Democracy, p.108.
See, for example, J. Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1999).
G. Geisler, ‘Parliament is Another Terrain of Struggle’, Journal of Modern African Studies,
38/4 (2000), p.16.
Geisler, ‘Parliament is Another Terrain of Struggle’, p.16.
Geisler, ‘Parliament is Another Terrain of Struggle’, p.18.
Geisler, ‘Parliament is Another Terrain of Struggle’, p.2.
Helen Suzman interview with Louise Vincent, 52 Second Avenue, Illovo, 25 March 2000.
Marques-Pereira, ‘Political Representation in Belgium’.
Phillips, Politics of Presence, p.99.
Phillips, Politics of Presence, p.98.
Phillips, Politics of Presence, p.100.
Squires, ‘Quotas for Women’, p.77.
Squires, ‘Quotas for Women’, p.77.
Cited in Mansbridge, ‘Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women?’
Dobrowolsky, ‘Intersecting Identities and Inclusive Institutions’, p.240.
H. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Los Angeles, CA: University of California
Press, 1967).
See, for example, H.F. Gosnell, Democracy: The Threshold of Freedom (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1948); J. Jónasdóttir, Why Women are Oppressed (Philadelphia, IL:
Temple University Press, 1994).
Vos, ‘Women in Parliament’, p.108.
Vos, ‘Women in Parliament’, p.108.
S. Baden, S. Hassim and S. Meintjes, Country Gender Profile: South Africa (Pretoria: SIDA,
1999), p.6.
96
THE JOURNAL OF LEGISLATIVE STUDIES
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
‘All Froth and No Substance’, Mail and Guardian, 2 June 2003.
Dobrowolsky, ‘Intersecting Identities’, p.242.
T. Lodge, Politics in South Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), p.258.
‘Push for Zebra Principle in Parliament’, Mail and Guardian, 8 Aug. 2003.
‘The 2002 Report Card’, Mail and Guardian 20 Dec. 2002.
‘The 2002 Report Card’, Mail and Guardian 20 Dec. 2002.
‘Push for Zebra Principle in Parliament’, Mail and Guardian 8 Aug. 2003.
Geisler, ‘Parliament is Another Terrain of Struggle’, p.1.
Cited in Marques-Pereira, ‘Political Representation in Belgium’, p.24.
Htun and Jones, ‘Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-Making’, pp.45–7.
Htun and Jones, ‘Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-Making’, p.47.
Htun and Jones, ‘Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-Making’, p.47.
Htun and Jones, ‘Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-Making’, p.49.
A.-L. Alatorre, Parties, Gender and Democratization: The Causes and Consequences of
Women’s Participation in the Mexican Congress. BA thesis, Harvard University, 1999, p.49.
Htun and Jones, ‘Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-Making’, p.52.
Htun and Jones, ‘Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-Making’, p.48.
Htun and Jones, ‘Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-Making’, p.48.
Dahlerup, ‘Using Quotas to Increase Women’s Political Representation’, p.105.
Marques-Perreira, ‘Political Representation in Belgium’, p.29.
Dahlerup, ‘Using Quotas to Increase Women’s Political Representation’, p.2.
Cited in Budlender et al., Participation of Women in the Legislative Process, p.37.
Vos, ‘Women in Parliament: A Personal Perspective’, p.110.
S. Hassim, ‘From Presence to Power: Women’s Citizenship in a New Democracy’, Agenda,
40 (1999), p.13.
Phillips, Politics of Presence, p.59.
61.
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67.
68.
69.
70.