When the faces of the 11 rebels who challenged Jennifer Smith stared at out from the front page of Saturday's Royal Gazette, readers would have noticed the sharp contrast to the remnants of the Smith team pictured beneath.

While the dissidents were exclusively male, Premier Smith's hastily cobbled together Cabinet was notably more diverse with five women.

For one highly placed Smith supporter, the rebel camp's stance was living embodiment of a deep unhappiness to accept women in prominent roles.

He lamented: “That misogynistic attitude is part of Bermuda's culture. There is a male dominance thing in Bermuda, it's something people don't want to address.

“They will pretend that isn't it but it is. It is very dangerous.”

But he noted the “big he-men challengers” had kept a low profile and failed to mount an open challenge in November before mounting their coup.

Also in the mix is a different set of moral values among the challengers who disapproved of some of the Smith set.

But again the Smith supporter lamented the narrow-minded attitude which came into play rather than deciding who was the best choice for the job.

And to marginalise women at the top when they did so much for the party at the bottom could backfire, warned the source who noted that women were the bedrock of the party.

“It's women who make things run,” he said.

And he noted that, although the Premier had been attacked for her personal style, she must have been doing something right after taking the party to its first two ever election victories.

He said the new group had done it the lazy way rather than working to build a consensus which women did.

“The Premier has the biggest branch, the biggest vote.”

He said “all hell could have broken loose” if she had exercised her power in Sunday's stormy delegates meeting and tried to hold on.

“I have to commend her for not wanting to split the baby in half like in the Bible. That was noble. It could have gotten really nasty.”

He contrasted it with the rebel camp. “What we had there was a roar of testosterone.”

One rebel supporter was candid about the gender element in the divisions in the party, and labelled it as a matriarchy.

He said Ms Smith and her clique had been pursuing a feminist agenda rather than looking out for the working class and increasing economic opportunities for underprivileged blacks.

Indeed he noted that Ms Smith had shied away from even mentioning race and talked in euphemisms of “equal opportunities”.