Women have seen many gains. Can Australia hold on to them?

Tomorrow marks International Women’s Day, and while plenty of Australian businesses across the country still host pink-cupcake-catered “empowerment” events, it’s worth noting that the vacuous, corporate, “empowerment” feminism fever has broken. The past few years have seen significant, meaningful policy and cultural gains for women on many fronts. 

The urgent issue now is the fragility of those gains as we head into an election and some strong headwinds: the global “anti-gender” movement is gaining strength (Trump’s reelection is but a symptom of a wider problem), and Australia’s feminist infrastructure, so to speak, may not be up to the task.

Anne Summers’ 2013 book The Misogyny Factor asks why, after four decades of collective work in Australia on what she described as “the equality project”, we hadn’t made more progress. The book was based on two landmark speeches Summers gave in 2012; it’s an instructive re-read in 2025. 

As Summers writes:

A bitter lesson of the past forty years has been the realisation that we have not been able to guarantee that a reform will be permanent … it did not occur to us back then that a hard-won reform could actually be unwound, reversed, repealed.

Summers expressed regret that Australian feminists of the second wave, herself included, took a “pragmatic” approach to change by seizing upon the opportunity afforded by the election of a “sympathetic” Whitlam government in 1972 to pursue “a realistic and achievable agenda”. Many chose to join the ranks of government to work towards that agenda “from the inside”, and the uniquely Australian phenomenon of the ‘femocrat” was born.

“Having a sympathetic government would be a key, probably essential element of success,” wrote Summers. “In retrospect, this was probably one of the strategic errors of the early women’s movement. We should have realised the need for a powerful external lobby organisation.”

Summers described how, over four decades, various reforms (usually introduced by a “sympathetic” Labor government) were subsequently unpicked by a Coalition government. The laundry list of reversals under the Howard government alone is striking, especially in light of their long-lasting consequences on women’s safety and economic security. The most recent Great Undoing was under the last Coalition government, which saw Australia fall in the 2016 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap rankings from 24th to a low of 50th in 2021. 

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Now, on the cusp of an election, the continuing lack of a powerful, independent, external women’s lobby — as well as recent advances being tied to the work of “femocratic” institutions within government or supposedly “independent” non-profits and agencies largely funded by government — means that should the Coalition government be reelected (or even a hung parliament in which the Coalition forms government), there’s a real possibility of another Great Undoing.

These government-funded “femocrats” and their various organisations will be powerless to stop or slow this, and certainly not in the vocal and strident ways the current international backlash and context call for. They will all, rightly, fear their organisation’s funding — and their jobs — are at stake. 

The gender pay gap, a key measure of equality between men and women, is a key example of how easily progress could be set back. Last year it hit a record low of 11.5%, down from 13% the previous year, the steepest annual fall since 2016. It was almost 19% ten years ago.

Economist Leonora Risse argued the Albanese government’s “targeted action” helped explain this progress, including efforts to tackle the so-called “undervaluing of women’s work” in the care economy with pay rises for aged care workers and early years educators. She also said legislative change that allowed the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) to publicly report the gender pay gap of all businesses with more than 100 employees has “had an effect”.

But listening to Senator Jane Hume question the current head of WGEA, Mary Wooldridge, at Senate estimates last week about lease and work-from-home arrangements and whether or not the agency followed its own advice — a line of questioning Minister for Women Katy Gallagher rightly described as designed to “besmirch” the reputation of the agency — I had intense déjà vu. 

Back in the days after Tony Abbot was first elected in 2013, he had WGEA firmly in his sights. Despite Australia having just clocked the worst gender pay gap disparity in 20 years at 18.2%, he threatened to roll back the agency’s gender pay gap reporting regime, which at the time was barely three years old (and didn’t publicly report the size of the gap at individual employers, only industry composites).

Judging by the nature of Senator Hume’s questioning, if the Coalition forms government, it could be Groundhog Day for WGEA and gender pay gap reporting. “I think you should just be upfront about what you’re doing here,” Senator Gallagher said at estimates. “You used to support WGEA and now you don’t support WGEA.”

After that fiery (and revealing) exchange, WGEA again released data earlier this week that publicly exposed the size of the gender pay gap at every business in Australia with more than 100 staff, meaning many Australians can look up the size of the gender pay gap at their employer.

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This is only the second year that data has been published thanks to new legislation passed by the Albanese government in 2023. Previously, businesses provided this information to WGEA, but the agency only published industry composites, not individual employer data.

Also this week, Senator Hume, addressing the Liberal-aligned think tank The Menzies Research Centre on Monday night, declared war on work-from-home policies, which have long helped women with caring responsibilities stay in the workforce. “It will be an expectation of a Dutton Liberal government that all members of the APS work from the office five days a week,” she announced.

The senator claimed work-from-home arrangements were hurting productivity — unfortunately for her, she cited research that actually argued the opposite. 

Should we see more of these kinds of pledges in the upcoming election, and should the Coalition return to government with an eye towards unpicking recent gains — or should the Coalition seek to reach an agreement with independents in the event of a hung parliament — the problematic “pragmatic approach” is not going to get us anywhere.

It could well come down to independents, who last ran on a platform of women’s rights to act as a firewall against this endless cycle. And at some point, feminists, whether working “on the inside” or organising more broadly, are going to need to find a way to structurally lock in reform to cement some permanent gains.

Otherwise, the cycle will continue. History tells us that.