On Sunday, the cabinet approved Education Minister Yoav Kisch’s nominee, Assaf Tselal, a senior air force officer, for the post of his ministry’s director general. Kisch apparently didn’t intend to do so, but in his first move as minister, he taught Israeli students an important lesson.
At school, students learn how important it is to invest effort and work hard to excel, but in politics, at least, it turns out that this isn’t always true. Sometimes it’s enough to be a man, and the boss’s friend from his army days.
The press release about Tselal’s appointment said he was a combat pilot, “just like the education minister,” and that his educational experience begins and ends with volunteering at schools in Israel’s periphery. The reasons given for his qualification for the job – at least according to the ministry’s spokespeople – lead to a worrying conclusion: A senior army officer close to a minister deserves to be put in charge of Israeli education even if his involvement in the field is a hobby.
In a country where most Israel Defense Forces chiefs of staff have gone into politics and a senior rank in the army is sufficient to rank high on parties’ Knesset tickets, can a woman, no matter how talented, compete against a candidate like Tselal? Can degrees and years of experience in the education field really beat out the minister’s friend, someone with whom he spent “many good years in joint combat flights,” as the ministry’s press release put it?
After all, educating is clearly a feminine profession; most of those who study, work and research in the education field are women. But how many female experts did Kisch consider for the role before deciding that an IDF officer was more suitable than them to head the education system?
In discussions on the importance of appointing women to senior positions, the claim is frequently made that the composition of decision-making bodies shouldn’t be engineered out of a desire to make them more representative, but rather that it’s important to pick the best person for the job – man or woman. Opponents of the battle for equal representation argue that appointees should be chosen solely based on talent, not on gender, and that calls for women to be appointed would undermine the quality of appointments.
But reality shows – surprise, surprise – that it is men who are generally selected for the most senior positions in politics, even if they aren’t the most suitable candidates.
For instance, of the current government’s 31 ministers, only six are women. And some of them have minor, almost meaningless portfolios. Nor is there a single woman among the ministry director generals appointed to date.
In an egalitarian society, a majority that lopsided wouldn’t be possible. After all, men aren’t born more talented. If appointments were truly based on fitness for office, senior positions would be distributed more equally.
But our society isn’t egalitarian. Women seeking to enter or advance in politics face numerous barriers. Education and lack of representation train them to understand that politics is “for men,” that what we have to say isn’t necessarily true or important, and that we should work in more “feminine” professions – on top of raising the children and doing the housework (which doesn’t leave a lot of free time for hobbies like volunteering at schools in the periphery).
Both the media and the public judge us by impossible standards. They scrutinize our appearance and femininity and constantly imply that we didn’t get ahead on our own merits.
Any woman who nevertheless manages to make it into the Knesset or the cabinet has to fight for her place in a sometimes hostile male environment and make do with posts deemed less important. No woman has ever been appointed to chair the Knesset Finance Committee, the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee or the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee – three of the most important jobs in the Knesset.
Kisch’s pick proves that the “old boy’s network” is the biggest barrier of all. It defies all logic and negates the value of degrees, training and experience. It has made success impossible. When a man can run a ministry despite having relevant experience equivalent to that of a youth group counselor, a woman must be an incredible superwoman to be considered suitable – and even then, the friend from the army will win out.
Kisch has only just entered office, but female students can already learn an important lesson from him. There’s no point in studying and working hard, because they have no chance in any case. In the end, men will appoint other men.
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