On November 5, Justin Trudeau was sworn in as Canada’s 23rd prime minister, and along with him, his cabinet members, who for the first time in Canadian history were equally comprised of men and women.

The cabinet is now perfectly gender-balanced, with a 50/50 split between female and male ministers.

Among our new cabinet members we have Jody Wilson-Raybould, a former Crown prosecutor and regional chief of the B.C. Assembly of First Nations, who was sworn in as Attorney General and Justice Minister. It is important to note that Wilson-Raybould is also the first aboriginal person to hold this position.

We also have Carolyn Bennett, a family physician and Member of Parliament since 1997, who will act as Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs; Chrystia Freeland, a Rhodes scholar, author, editor, and journalist, who will act as Minister of International Trade; and Catherine McKenna, a human rights lawyer, founder of Canadian Lawyers Abroad and former legal advisor to the United Nations, who will act as Minister of Environment and Climate Change.

These are only a handful of the accomplished and impressive women who will serve in our government.

This is a great step towards gender equality in our country. Under our former government, the cabinet included 12 female members out of 39, accounting for only 30 percent female representation. Our new prime minister should be applauded for not only supporting, but for acting on and realizing gender parity and equal representation between the sexes in government.

But there are those who disagree with his decision. 

Using words like tokenism, they have attempted to discredit these new female cabinet members and our prime minister. They argue that the appointments were not based on “merit”, but rather on solely on gender.

National Post columnist Andrew Coyne has stated that, “So far as we are putting representationalism before ability, we are also asking the country’s interest to take a back seat.”

Without mincing words—this argument is stupid. It is also insulting and short-sighted. Coyne and others like him are missing the point altogether.

What Coyne fails to account for when he talks about tokenism versus merit is the flipside—discrimination versus privilege. There are systematic structures of discrimination in place, which allow some individuals to succeed, while denying others similar opportunities.

These structures are rooted in racism and sexism. They have been in place for thousands of years. To say that these systems do not exist is more than ignorant—it is willfully blind.

This means that some people will have to work much harder than others to get ahead in life, and even when they do, they will still face barriers and disadvantages that the privileged do not. The playing field will need to be leveled for them. And that’s okay.

But even when women do achieve great things, Coyne’s argument still sets them up to fail because it assumes that one cannot be both accomplished and a woman. It assumes that these women were not selected to cabinet for their many accomplishments, their wisdom, expertise, experience, and skills but instead for their genitals.

It tells women and girls, “You cannot be both a woman and independently meritorious. No matter what you do—you cannot escape your womanhood and therefore your worth will always be reduced. You will not achieve anything worthwhile, and if you do, people will not applaud your hard work, dedication and intelligence, but will instead say that it was only because you got an unfair ‘leg up.’”

And then it goes even further because it also assumes that there is always a better man for the job—with an emphasis on man. When Coyne said that by appointing women to cabinet, Trudeau was putting our country’s interests on the “back seat”, he was really saying that any man would do a better job than any woman. Period.

Someone needs to break the news to Coyne—women make up 50 percent of our country’s population.

So why wouldn’t we expect to be equally represented in government? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to make important decisions for ourselves and for all Canadians? To assume that women can’t get the job done just as well, or even better than, a man is insulting, small-minded and sexist.

But it’s something that women continue to deal with each and every day—no matter how skilled or how accomplished we may be.

Just ask the members of an all-female archaeology team who discovered the bones of previously unknown species of human in a South African cave, whose findings were over-shadowed by the speculation that many male cavers had been “denied” the opportunity to make the discovery on their own. Or the Russian six female astronauts leading an experimental mission on space travel, who were asked how they would cope without makeup for eight days rather than being questioned about the scientific merits of their work. Or the countless female doctors, lawyers, accountants, scientists, police officers, engineers, and other professionals’ whose work is undervalued, scrutinized, and critiqued in ways that their male counterparts could not even imagine.

This is unacceptable. And it needs to stop.

While achieving gender-parity in government is not the end of the struggle, it is a great step forward. Canada is setting an example for the world. We are showing that, in 2015, Canadian women are not only equal to Canadian men, but are also beginning to be treated as such.