50/50 Campaign Seminar: 50/50 Representation for 100% Accountability?

I attended the Seminar, organised by the Gender Advocacy Programme, on the 8^th of September 2008 to discuss representation of women in government in South Africa. I found the deliberations to be interesting - and we clearly need spaces to discuss our thoughts and cautions about the issues. Discussions were lively and resulted in some interesting debates, as a speaker pointed out "after 14 years of 30% women representation, will 50% do more?".

Even with the disappointing turn out, delegates debated the issue of representation of women, and linked this to accountability. Emily Craven from the Joint Working Group on LGBTI started us off with her presentation (and she drew on points made by Vanessa Ludwig from the Triangle Project in the Cape Town Seminar).

In it, she pointed out the disappointing response from government on the recent increase in hate crimes against lesbian women, saying "I have never heard a senior official at national or provincial level speak out about hate crimes... in fact the opposite has been true, with officials rather making homophobic statements". She pointed out that the intersection of vulnerabilities that lesbian women experience are inextricably linked and that they are vulnerabilities that face all South African women to some extent.

"50/50 % is a no-brainer - of course we must have equal representation" she said, "but we live in a patriarchal state and equal representation does not transform this patriarchal system of power". Craven pointed out that putting a woman's face onto an untransformed system merely makes it harder for us to challenge it. She cautioned us to not leave women behind in our campaign - that there cannot be a disjuncture between formal and substantive equality and our efforts must ensure that they result in real changes to women's lived experiences.

Proj Sheila Meintjies, from Wits University (and the Chairperson of Women'sNet's board) followed and summarised the arguments for a 50/50 quota for women's representation. She asked "can any one woman in power stand for all women?" and pointed out that we have had the mistaken assumption that women in power represented two interests: their party and women.

Commissioner Tebhogo Maitse from the Commission for Gender Equality made strong statements in favour of a legislated quota of women in governments - going so far as to say that this quota should be in place for political parties as well, and that if they do not have 50% on their lists come election time, they should be refused registration by the IEC. The Commissioner said she had been disappointed at recent events - pointing out that the ANC women's League failed to put a woman's name forward as a presidential candidate. She also supported making sure we don't leave women behind in our efforts. She also, somewhat controversially, added that we must also protect women from unfavourable media attacks - saying that Manto Msimang faced enormous unfavorable press and would not have faced the same treatment had she been male. She said that we should be protecting women in power.

Professor Shireen Hassim of Wits (another Women'sNet board member) reflected in her presentation that "yes, it helped to have 30% women in government, but it helped more that one or two of those women were feminists". Hassim took a more critical view of women's performance in government "what do these patriarchs have to fear from women?" and of the chances of the campaign to change this failure. She went even further to say that the lack of progress "has happened under our watch - do we see the results of this excellent formal equality?". She suggested that the 50/50 campaign start from looking at accountability and then move on to numbers. The meeting agreed that we should protect women in power from sexist attacks, but not from legitimate accountability.

Jody Fredericks from the Women's Legal Centre summarised work on the proposed Bill for equal representation and Susan Tolmay from Gender Links rounded off discussions by taking a regional view of the current situation of representativity in SADC.

I did the round off and thanks, and we closed with a lot of work to do! Members of the core partnership met at Women'sNet to discuss our way forward.

For more information on the campaign, click on the '50/50: Getting the Balance Right" link on the left of this page, under 'campaigns'.