Gender equality in Australia: looking for the silver bullets in the short and long term

ABSTRACT

With the goal of gender equality far from reached in Australia, many are looking for alternative solutions to address gendered disparities between men and women. Along with more equal representation in politics, Australia needs leaders who lead with women in mind. This nation also needs legislators who are willing to step away from neutrality and use the law to help transform decades of discrimination against women. Leadership decisions about law and policy reform need to be based on data, requiring disaggregation along, first, gender lines, but also race and income, allowing a leader to be more conscious of the implications of their decisions on the lives of the people they lead.

KEYWORDS:

• gender equality
• leadership
• gender-responsive legislation
• women leaders
• women Presidents
• women Prime Ministers

Acknowledgement

This research was supported, in part, by funding from the Department of Foreign Affairs Development Leadership Programme (2020-2022), the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia Research Fellowship (2020-2021) and the UTS Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship. Thanks is owed to José-Miguel Bello y Villarino for his thoughtful remarks on an earlier version of this commentary.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ramona Vijeyarasa

Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she has designed a “Gender Legislative Index” to assess the gender-responsiveness of domestic laws. She is editor of International Women’s Rights and Gender Equality: Making the Law Work for Women (2021) and author of Sex, Slavery and the Trafficked Women: Myths and Misconceptions about Trafficking and its Victims (2015). Ramona’s research is informed by a decade of working in civil society. Ramona was the 2020 Women’s Leadership Institute Australia Research Fellow and has research grants and awards from New York University, the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.