JAMIL F. KHAN | Male-dominated DA leadership reignites gender imbalance debate

The Democratic Alliance (DA)’s latest federal leadership line-up is, once again, overwhelmingly male and reopens long‑standing questions about what the party truly communicates about power, representation, and belonging.

Across multiple election cycles, the pattern has repeated with near‑ritualistic precision: men dominate the upper tiers, women appear as rare exceptions, and the party retreats into the familiar language of “merit” when challenged.

But this year’s slate, and the physical performance surrounding its announcement, sharpened the contradiction in a way that is impossible to ignore.

Only one woman, Siviwe Gwarube, secured a place among the top federal positions in the new configuration.

The rest of the leadership is composed almost entirely of men: a continuation rather than an aberration. Historically, the party has insisted that its leadership emerges through open contestation unshaped by quotas.

Yet the results mirror older patterns so consistently that the narrative of “pure meritocracy” begins to appear less like principle and more like a shield.

The gender imbalance is not confined to spreadsheets of elected officials. It is visible in the physical staging of victory: the body language, the triumphant chest‑forward postures, the hearty backslaps, the clenched fists thrust into air thick with the symbolism of conquest.

Observers have noted that the DA’s male leaders frequently perform a brand of polished, assertive masculinity, one that blends corporate confidence with an almost sporting theatrics of winning.

These gestures might appear trivial, but they carry meaning. Political leadership is also a choreography, a visual grammar through which dominance, belonging, and authority are signalled, and the DA’s choreography remains overwhelmingly male-coded.

It is not only that there are fewer women; it is that the stage, the tone, and the celebratory rituals seem built for and inhabited by men.

This becomes especially striking when juxtaposed with the DA’s own recent history.

In 2009, Helen Zille’s all‑male executive council in the Western Cape prompted criticism from the Commission for Gender Equality, which warned that such decisions entrench “patriarchal attitudes and beliefs”. More than a decade later, the federal picture remains remarkably similar.

The repetition is not accidental. Analysts have long pointed to the DA’s structural barriers to internal transformation. In 2018, commentators highlighted how the party’s top eight leadership was dominated by white men, with only one black woman elected, revealing a configuration remarkably similar to the present moment.

Internal reforms meant to “actively promote” diversity rarely materialised as meaningful action. Diversity clauses were adopted, but without mechanisms to change leadership pipelines or candidate selection cultures.

The gender imbalance is not incidental but structural.

The “merit” the DA operates on as an electoral principle somehow seems to keep producing overwhelmingly white and male leadership, suggesting, then, that white men in particular and men in general are the only ones who hold merit.

Patronage networks, informal power centres, and a long‑standing cultural ethos shaped by its historical core continue to shape outcomes. Women may lead key portfolios or shine in legislative roles, but when it comes to the party’s symbolic apex, they remain peripheral.

Masculinity is never neutral in politics. It shapes who is imagined as a leader, how leadership is performed, and what bodies appear “natural” on the political stage.

In the DA, the performative masculinity seen during electoral victories reinforces an older gender script, one that frames leadership as physically assertive, competitive, and dominated by controlled aggression.

These are not qualities exclusive to men, but they are cultivated in ways that reinforce a gendered hierarchy. When a line-up of men floods the stage after winning internal positions with arms raised, jaws set, bodies moving with a rehearsed confidence, the message is as visual as it is political.

Women are not absent; they are simply rendered exceptions rather than norms. Gwarube’s presence highlights this asymmetry rather than solving it. Moreover, the party’s public image remains tied to male faces.

The DA’s most prominent personalities, whether Geordin Hill‑Lewis, Chris Pappas, John Steenhuisen, or Athol Trollip, form a distinctly male (and often white) set of ambassadors. Even when these leaders are widely respected or admired, their dominance reinforces a gendered imbalance of visibility and influence.

South Africa’s constitutional imperative is explicit: the state and society must take active measures to redress inequality, including gender inequality. The DA, by contrast, continues to resist measures that would structurally produce parity.

Its reliance on “merit” rhetoric functions as a philosophy of non‑intervention, one that reframes the absence of parity as natural rather than the product of internal culture. But gender parity is not merely representational.

It is strategic.

Political science research consistently shows that parties with more women in leadership produce more inclusive policy agendas, connect more effectively with diverse electorates, and perform better in expansive, multi‑racial democracies.

The DA is competing for the support of urban and peri‑urban voters, including women who must see themselves reflected in the party’s power structure. A leadership corps of almost exclusively men sends the opposite message.

The deeper issue is that the DA often treats criticism of its leadership profile as an attack on its core liberal philosophy, as if quotas or structural interventions would violate the sanctity of individual merit. This framing ignores that organisations reproduce inequality through norms and networks long before merit even enters the picture.

The result is a crisis of imagination. The party that still aspires to national government has boxed itself into a demographic and symbolic corner. Its leadership style, ideological posture, and public imagery increasingly appeal to a shrinking voter segment.

The absence of women in senior federal roles is not simply a demographic oversight; it is a sign of an organisation unable or unwilling to reimagine itself beyond its historical centre of gravity.

A meaningful transformation of the DA’s leadership begins with acknowledging that gender imbalance is not a problem of optics but of power. It requires more than one woman on the top slate; it requires a decision to structurally cultivate women leaders who are not Helen Zille, redistribute internal influence, and redesign the physical and symbolic rituals of leadership.

The physical theatre of masculine victory may energise internal constituencies, but it alienates the broader public and contradicts the party’s claim to liberal universalism.

Until the stage itself welcomes different kinds of bodies, until the choreography changes, the DA will remain locked in the paradox of performing modernity while reproducing old gender hierarchies. In that contradiction lies the party’s most profound political limitation.

Dr Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.